DRAGUIGNAN, France — News from Israel echoes darkly here along the winding narrow rue de la Juiverie — Jewry Street — where rich medieval families built a stately synagogue, razed long ago, near what is now a fast-food joint called French Taco.

Jews in France thrived by providing financial services the New Testament scorned. They clustered in apartheid ghettos within cities, forced to wear yellow badges reading "Juif" and forbidden to venture out at night.

King Louis IX, France's devout Saint Louis, expelled Jews in 1236, partly to welch on loans so he could fund Crusades against Muslims in a land three major faiths called holy. Pogroms and persecution followed across Europe for the next eight centuries.

My father escaped Belarus as a kid. My mother's family fled Ukraine. Happily, they settled in America and not here. When I was born, Jews were being sent in boxcars to German death camps.

Today, 15 million Jews are all over the map, physically and spiritually. But their shared watchword is a prayer beginning, "Sh'ma Yisrael." Hear, O Israel. It refers to an ancient concept, not a small country run by a heartless politician desperate to avoid prison.

As a reporter named Rosenblum based in France since 1977, traveling often throughout the Islamic world, I have seen sharp shifts in antisemitism since 2017. That is when an ignorant, transactional U.S. president began wreaking havoc across the Middle East.

This is an analysis by a mostly non-practicing American Jew, a lifelong reporter committed to the elusive goal of "objectivity."

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AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — Donald Trump defined himself in Texas early this month on the banks of the Guadalupe. Fixing a young reporter with a half-lidded mafioso glare, he said in his signature low, mean voice, "You are a very evil person."

"I don't know who you are," he added, "but..."

She is his boss, one of 174 million Americans eligible to vote. They hired him on a four-year contract subject to cancellation, and potentially prison, if he betrayed their trust by putting his own selfish interests ahead of theirs.

Trump, appallingly ignorant but not stupid, personifies the evil he projects onto others. And he does what despots have always done: shoot the messenger. In his last term, few people objected. Now he is back with ludicrous lawsuits and access bans.

Colonials nearly bled dry to escape a monarch. Heeding history back to Aristotle and Caesar, they crafted a failsafe constitution to thwart despots. It survived a Civil War, a Great Depression and Hitler's attempt to ethnically cleanse the world.

Today, it is a parchment relic in the National Archives of a nation that defends its Second Amendment — gun rights — more than its First. And without a free press that can tell citizens what a president does in their name, demagogy trumps democracy.

That reporter had asked Trump what he would say to stricken families not warned in time. An answer would have shed light on $4 trillion tax cuts and exposed Kristi Noem, the homeland security czarina preening next to him, as a cruel incompetent.

Stepping back, that defining moment is a dab on a vast ugly canvas. Much of the United States, a democratic superpower equipped to confront global crises while defending basic human values, is now deaf, blind and dumb.

Trump responded that way repeatedly during Covid-19. Pressed to explain his self-serving denial of a mysterious pathogen, he hurled vicious insults at journalists. Americans died in droves, and a runaway pandemic mutated across the world.

Now flush with contributions from fossil fuel and mining industries, he sneers at questions about looming climate collapse or devastated wilderness.

Out here in the real world, America's adversaries rejoice. Its oldest allies see a mercurial narcissistic bully them with crippling tariffs as he provokes needless war. At one point, I heard a gutsy reporter ask him why. He replied, "Because I can."