EAGLE PASS, Texas — A fresh-faced sergeant in U.S. camouflage stopped me at a gate flanked by razor-wire coils and armored Humvees. His "sir," tightly polite, was by the book. The message behind it was clear: "Beat it! I'm here to save the world."

I've seen that from Somalia to Afghanistan and parts in between. But never in America. A phony "border emergency" is savaging the Constitution, while making that world far more dangerous. That feeds deepening hatred abroad for a once-admired nation.

Donald Trump's dehumanizing, simplistic lies are starkly plain in this bilingual town of 28,000. Before a crush at the border in 2021 when his first term ended, people lived in relaxed symbiosis with Piedras Negras just across the Rio Grande.

That barred gate led into Shelby Park, 80 acres by the International Bridge where townsfolk used to gather for July 4 fireworks, concerts, family celebrations and kayaking on the river. The park is now a walled camp for idle photo-op troops.

Trump ordered a crackdown, then sealed the border under Title 42 of the federal public health code during the Covid-19 pandemic. Joe Biden's more humane policies unleashed a backed-up crush on the southern frontier from Tijuana to East Texas.

The human tide had ebbed to a trickle by the end of 2024. Yet Republican propagandists bang away at "Biden's Border Crisis." Greg Abbott, governor of a once-tolerant Texas, leads a jihad against impoverished migrants and families fleeing for their lives.

Rather than reopen Shelby Park, Abbott has fortified it as the base of his $11 billion Operation Lone Star, capable of housing 1,800 well-fed National Guardsmen. Billions more pay for private security forces, detention centers, floating pontoons and makeshift obstacles.

Texas taxpayers have sent at least 100,000 destitute, exhausted people as political pawns to New York, Chicago and other "blue" parts of America. Abbott's buses dumped one group off at Kamala Harris's vice-presidential residence in Washington.

Now Abbott wants federal funds to repay the costs of stopping a bogus invasion of people Trump slanders as vicious criminals and mental deviants.

Before heading to Eagle Pass, I asked long-time colleagues for trustworthy sources. They directed me to Amerika Garcia Grewal, at 48 an activist-researcher with a gift for fitting disparate detail into context.

"This is not about immigration," she told me. "It is the biggest heist the United States has ever seen." Hardline Republicans have figured out how to monetize misery and poverty, she said. "The United States is using the Texas model and expanding it."

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TUCSON — America is far beyond a "constitutional crisis." It faces blatant smash-and-grab plunder by grasping narcissists bent on stripping away human decency. Truculent ignorance among those who support them is breathtaking.

Donald Trump flouts every check and balance that kept a United States together for most of its 250 years. A weekend X-tweet worthy of Napoleon made that clear: "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."

He sets the world ablaze, yet few Americans seem alarmed at distant bonfires they don't believe concern them. Europeans see the end of an 80-year Atlantic alliance. Lisbon's Correio da Manhã captured the mood: Trump treats Europe like Puerto Rico.

In Saudi Arabia, his aides are negotiating "peace" in Ukraine with Russians. Europeans are excluded. Volodymyr Zelensky rejects any agreement without his participation. "It seems the most powerful member of NATO," he said bitterly, "is Russia."

And out of the blue, Trump now suddenly demands half of all future income from Ukraine's mines and resources in exchange for nothing. By his delusional estimate, that would be a $500 billion mugging.

I asked Alan Weisman to sum up the challenge. His last book, "The World Without Us," examined how Earth would restore itself if humans weren't in the way. He crisscrossed the globe for his upcoming "Hope Dies Last." He replied:

"Given runaway climate change and accelerating species extinction that eventually must include ourselves, how do we explain presidential decrees bound to hasten both these existential threats?

"Simple: Faced with the approaching end of his own sordid, bloated life, Trump’s ultimate petulant intention is to drag the rest of us down with him."

The question echoes everywhere: What can one person do? Three things: get informed; get outraged; get involved. The hardest, by far, is the first.

Voters need to know why "breaking news" broke -- and what might come next. New technology helps inform people. It also allows demagogues to bury reality under bullshit.

The Associated Press has been a reliable source since the 1800s, in recent years covering dramatic upheaval and daily doings in a disparate world. Trump is trying to kill it. A Washington Post op-ed was headlined: "This is a perfectly fine hill for the AP to die on."

No, this is a hill on which America might die.

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TUCSON — Nightmare plots don't get crazier: Mars-Obsessed Muskrat Attacks With a Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight! With a cup of tariff-free Colombian coffee and a world map, imagine a revived American dream that extends beyond borders.

A groundswell of outrage building fast across the country offers hope. Whether can rescue an imperiled United States and a planet on the boil depends on how many Americans see global reality as it is.

One syntax-challenged Elon Musk X-tweet rises above so much other insanity: "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead." The agency, he contends, is evil and criminal.

Seeing that, I thought of the colorful painting on my office wall in France. Mobutu Sese Seko and two other presidents wave to a cheering crowd from a Lincoln convertible in 1967 to herald a short-lived "democracy": the United States of Central Africa.

A Kinshasa street artist painted it on a cut-open, stretched flour sack marked "U.S. Agency for International Development" with its logo of clasped hands.

The CIA helped murder leftist Patrice Lumumba, one more case of foreign policy losing hearts and minds across the world. But the agency John F. Kennedy created to relieve poverty, protect health and build infrastructure made Americans the good guys.

During Mobutu's 32 years as Washington's son of a bitch and chaos that followed, at least 10 million Congolese — perhaps double that; no one was counting — have been killed in war and rebellion or died of malnutrition and preventable diseases.

The New York Times just displayed photos from the lake country near Goma. It was what I saw in 1967 and in 1994 when Rwandan refugees fled genocide. USAID workers helped victims of new mass killings, rape and starvation.

USAID likely does more than anything else to curb migration, terrorism, runaway pathogens and Chinese hegemony. Its $38 billion budget in 2024 was well below 1 percent of federal spending. Americans spent nearly four times as much on pets.

Over the decades, the agency has saved millions of lives abroad while protecting Americans at home. Today, the dreaded Ebola virus is spreading in Uganda. USAID was working to ensure no one carried it on international flights. No longer.

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TUCSON — When elephants fight, an old Swahili saying goes, the grass suffers. I've seen what that means since the 1960s, covering coups and upheaval in places Donald Trump calls shitholes. We are all seeing it already in America.

As Republicans war among themselves for favor from a trumpeting old bull, workaday families face a mire of pachyderm plop. The nation's grass roots run deep. Still, its character, decency, prosperity and good sense all hang in the balance.

When a threat comes with tanks and artillery, civilians put their lives on the line to defend democracy. In America, people only need to show up at the polls. In November, a third of those eligible did not bother to do even that.

A would-be king surpassed all expectations during his tragicomic coronation. The Clintons chortled onstage behind him at his "Gulf of America" declaration. But Elon Musk's later Seig Heil! salute fired up homegrown neo-Nazis and sent shivers abroad.

Trump again took the United States out of the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization. Those acts of blind hubris alone imperil countless lives on a planet his mega-billionaire backers intend to ravage with selfish abandon.

There is no border emergency. America badly needs more labor and entrepreneurs who create jobs. It has plenty of room for screened newcomers who arrive at its doors. Yet it repels families fleeing climate calamity and conflict for which it bears heavy blame.

Trump has frozen vital foreign aid that helps families stay home, where most would rather be. The European Union, overcrowded, pays Libyan pirates to deter new arrivals. Desperate migrants trapped in limbo are a ticking human time bomb.

Bludgeoning allies with high tariffs raises prices at home, and it enables slashed taxes for the rich. Tactics such as strong-arming Colombia into accepting two planeloads of 160 deportees are turning that "shining city on a hill" into a despised Gomorrah.

Countries that admired a nation which did so much to pick up the pieces after World War II now see tweets like this from Trump's puerile new press secretary: "Yesterday, Mexico accepted a record 4 deportation flights in 1 day!" America is not great again.

Hubert Vedrine, a former French foreign minister, captured the mood in what remains of a free world committed to democracy and a common front against global crises: "Trump is like an asteroid headed to Earth."

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