FLAYOSC, France — It was Jake Tapper himself who torpedoed Joe Biden's presidency. That CNN "debate" in June, a stopwatch-timed soundbite duel, allowed Donald Trump to smirk on a shared screen while preparing facile lies to counter substantive answers.

Biden, ragged from a long trip and hard diplomacy, was over-prepared for a serious exchange on complex issues. After he blanked, it did not matter if it was a momentary lapse or something worse. More than a lame duck, he was a dead one.

Now Tapper shamelessly flogs an anonymously sourced cowritten book that sucks up airtime and print space while a dictator-in-waiting, truly off the rails, bullies Congress into crippling democracy while pushing an imperiled world farther toward the edge.

CNN calls itself "the most trusted name in news." If Biden was already unfit for the job in 2022, it might have said so. In fact, he was all over the world map, including on an 11-hour train ride to Kyiv under Russian guns, to build alliances. Trump played golf.

Andy Borowitz was closer to truth with satire: "Biden Covered Up Health Woes with Four Years of Booming Economy."

"Original Sin," evoking that Adam and Eve apple bite, is a less overblown title if you make a metaphorical leap: a crabapple tree in human form is bearing poisonous fruit, turning an erstwhile Garden of Eden into uninhabitable wasteland.

Headlines focus on one big reveal. Biden might need a wheelchair.

Franklin Roosevelt spent four terms on wheels while bringing America out of a Great Depression caused by a Republican president's overuse of tariffs, then taking the lead with allies to keep Hitler and Hirohito from conquering the world.

The book says Biden needs eight hours of sleep, as most healthy people do. Instead, we have a manic would-be monarch who taps out brain farts on his phone at 3 a.m. which devastate struggling American families and imperil millions of lives across the world.

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TOURTOUR, France — I felt the mother of all rants coming on as a real-estate huckster in a disrespectful blue suit snored through a papal funeral — just after telling Volodymyr Zelensky he must cede to Satan the territory Ukrainians have bled for years to defend.

But faithful readers know my views on Donald Trump. Before getting into fresh facts, I imagined his own reckoning with Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates, facing the Ten Commandments without lawyers and truth-twisters on the public payroll.

Peter: "Let's skip adultery. I haven't got all week. How about bearing false witness?" Trump: "No, never." Peter: "Hmm, the Washington Post racked up 30,573 lies in your first term. Our lifetime tally wore out a dozen angels before they gave up in disgust."

It went downhill fast with coveting, stealing and all those graven images of himself that Trump markets at outrageous prices to his fleeced flock — even a schlocky King Donald's Bible.

There were awkward moments about Christ's teachings, like moneychangers in the temple and camels more likely to pass through the eye of a needle than uncharitable billionaires getting into Heaven.

Then Peter got to the big one, Thou shalt not kill. Trump sputtered: "But I never shot anyone on Fifth Avenue. That was just a boast to underscore my godlike status among all those suckers who worship me. Wait, let me rephrase that."

And here it gets serious — and very real.

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PARIS — Françoise Giroud's old warning resonates across Europe like an air-raid siren. As a reporter, a Resistance runner and a Gestapo prisoner, she learned the hard way what can happen when a power-mad deviant unleashes fanatic ideologues.

"This is how fascism begins," she wrote. "It never says its name. It creeps, it floats. When it reaches the tips of people's noses, they say: 'Is this it? You think? Don't exaggerate!' And then one day it smacks them in the mouth, and it is too late to get rid of it."

Giroud, co-founder of the weekly L'Express, was the first French cabinet minister for women's affairs. Her Jewish father ran an Ottoman Empire news agency before fleeing Turkey with his family in 1916 to find refuge in France.

She watched Americans overcome an aversion to foreign entanglements after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. The United States took the lead in beating back an evil axis, then spent heavily to pick up the pieces of a shattered world.

President Harry Truman rallied international support for Geneva conventions on human rights and a United Nations as bulwarks against future tyrannies.

Despots succeed with fear, not love, Machiavelli wrote in his demagogues' playbook. They cow dissenters into submission, then reward sycophants in calculated measure. And they mask their own failings by demonizing vulnerable minorities in their midst.

These days, Americans mostly fixate on the moment, ignoring history. Protecting democracy depends not on heeding a 15th-century Florentine but rather a cartoon possum. Walt Kelly's Pogo had it right: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

America's face to the world is now a treacherous, semi-literate felon who mocks the rule of law and spurns free trade. Dictators play on his narcissism. And even the closest, oldest U.S. allies, infuriated, intend to push back hard in every way they can.

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PARIS — The view is clear from across an ocean that is suddenly a whole lot wider: Donald Trump, trying to remake the world in his own hateful image, has aligned himself with Vladimir Putin and fellow despots. It seems that was his plan all along.

France is readying its tactical nuclear force to defend Ukraine. Its army now drills to fend off attack. The government distributes "survival manuals" and emergency kits. Families are urged to stockpile food, water and essentials to shelter for at least 72 hours.

Britain's Foreign Secretary David Lammy speaks diplomatic niceties to mollify Washington. Privately, he echoes what he said of Trump six years ago as a Parliament backbencher: "a tyrant" and "a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath."

Denmark's prime minister minces no words. She says as many Danes died per capita as Americans to support U.S. military operations. A Greenland invasion would trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty, making America the alliance's first wartime adversary.

And Germany's likely new chancellor warns NATO may be gone by June.

China prepares for potential hot war while winning a cold one across the global south, moving in as America cedes ground. Trump's punitive, insulting tariffs sparked harsh ripostes that could cripple world economies for years to come.

The Chinese think in decades and centuries, not four-year terms. "Losing face" is cultural anathema. An official told foreign reporters in Beijing that China remembers humiliating 19th-century opium wars when Western powers occupied its ports.

At home, Trump is taking America back 95 years, heedless of crippling immediate hardship among citizens he is sworn to protect. His tariffs are higher than those in 1930 that deepened the Great Depression and led to World War II.

Time remains to stop the Republican juggernaut before it implants itself permanently with rigged elections and voter suppression. Americans are waking up with nationwide peaceful protests and pressure on legislators. But there is not a day to lose.

A third of eligible voters opted out in 2024, including 21 million who cast ballots for Joe Biden in 2020. America's survival and the world's future depend on how citizens grasp the looming danger.

Franklin Roosevelt revived a sound economy largely with the Civilian Conservation Corps. Volunteers helped by military logistics earned basic wages by protecting the environment, farming fields and building vital infrastructure.

Today, America depends on a different CCC: Congress, courts and courage.

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TUCSON — Occasional notes tell me my free-lunch dispatches taste terrible — and the portions are too big. But an old pro National Geographic star who has watched global ups and downs for generations caught the essence of the last one.

He wrote: "I shall memorize and repeat this line as often as possible: "But there is no easy fix for American crises that have developed over decades. In the wider world, threats are beyond description. Doing anything helps. Doing nothing is unthinkable."

And he added a kind closer. "Let me know, please, when you are next passing the hat." In fact, I am.

As Yogi Berra, the malaprop-prone New York Yankee stalwart, once put it, "When you've come to a fork in the road, take it." That's my conundrum, and I need help.

I worked in the golden age of dinosaur correspondents — all-terrain vehicles who could live off the land. They knew where commas go in such phrases as "eats shoots and leaves." The longer they stomped through swamps and jungles, the more they learned.

My plan was to knock off at 80, if I was lucky enough to still be around. I would appreciate family and friends, commute between Emiliano the Olive Tree in Provence and Solomon the Saguaro in Arizona. And finish that book still trapped in a trunk.

But in 2016, a different sort of dinosaur, a rapacious T-rex, set about destroying the world. If he is not stopped now, we humans are toast. This is no time for old hands who have seen the reasons for this in up-close detail to sink into tarpits.

I want to stay at the keys at a time when reliable information is so hard to find. More than ever, long-time reporters with proven credibility who have seen how and why democracies fall apart must unscramble complex global realities.

On balance, I am scared witless yet still optimistic. I remember Michael Getler, a much-missed editor, ombudsman and mentor to young reporters: you can go awfully wrong betting against the American people.

Time remains to do the right thing. But only if enough people know what that is.

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