Mort Report is a labor of love by old-style correspondents with lifetimes on the road and young ones with fresh eyes. Our philosophy is simple: we report at first hand with analysis based on non-alternative fact, not opinion. If we get something wrong, we fix it.
DRAGUIGNAN, France — America is suddenly looking like itself again from across an ocean that over the past 16 months has widened into a forbidding moat. Different now, in a different world, but alive and kicking in a new coat of primary colors.
Earlier this summer my TV was at grave risk from flying objects. Each new day a plundering crime family, coldblooded profiteers and blind ideologues took another little piece of America's heart. A once-great nation was a loathed pariah.
But then World Cup fans from everywhere joined in the 250th birthday bash. They saw workaday Americans — as in, We, the People — take back celebrations from a mafia-don despot who tried to make it all about him.
Foreigners braved grilling at the borders and harsh security at the games. Yet crowds across the nation welcomed them like long-lost family. They ate barbeque with their hands, drank free beer, partied late and made lasting friendships.
Can-do ingenuity dazzled. Visitors were oddly smitten with ranch dressing, but TSA plucked bottles of it from their carry-on. Kraft swiftly came up with miniatures for them to take home where they spread the word about a big-hearted America.
They feted the Fourth under a blaze of pyrotechnics with joyous MAGA-averse music from Mill Valley to Valley Forge. The Boston Pops orchestra played backup to funk and jive near the harbor where colonials had dumped tea.
Trump struck a low note heard round the world. He strong-armed the games' organizers to reverse a penalty red card that would have kept America's star player from playing Belgium. Still, the Belgians won 4-1.
At the end, players did an awkward bump and grind to mock the little dance Trump does at rallies. In Brussels, team officials flipped a middle finger on social media: "Overturn this!"
Countless Americans who have shrugged off Trump's depredations, which by now amount to millions of needless deaths and incalculable human suffering, see their president for who he is. Whatever else, you don't fuck with football.
PARIS — At 5 a.m., pastel hues reflect off the Seine. Stately stone buildings emerge against an Eiffel Tower backdrop. Just upriver, Notre Dame stands tall again, ready for 1,000 more years. All things considered, Paris is a jewel in a world worth protecting,
Yet today will be hotter than hell, even more than Baja Arizona, baking the paint on my floating home. Our port's mama ducks and their ducklings have moved elsewhere for breakfast. They take some explaining, so I'll start with the big picture.
Donald Trump belongs in a padded cell, if not behind bars. Certainly not the White House. The problem is as much who he is as what he does. Everyone with a half-open mind ought to know this. And yet.
The Mort Report began in 2016 when I recognized the same sort of coup-plotting malignant narcissists I've reported on since Mobutu in the Congo during the 1960s. Trump has excelled at it in ways I never imagined were possible in America.
He seems unfathomably ignorant, but we underestimate him at our peril. He masters any despot's basic skill: savaging truth while hammering away at easily debunked lies. Steve Bannon, America's Rasputin, puts it simply: he floods the zone with shit.
Most people react to each outrage only until the next ones. Nothing stirs up a critical mass — not even nearly a million needless Covid deaths, insurrection at the Capitol, blatant graft climbing fast into the billions or jury rulings of sexual abuse.
For the outside world, his senseless assault on Iran was the last straw. It broke that figurative camel's back with a sound that echoes to every part of the planet. Headlines focus on America's humiliation, but it is far more than that.
A nuclear attack on America would be murder-suicide for any country that tried it. Yet if the world's richest country remains addicted to fossil fuels, climate collapse is certain.
Because of a pathological obsession with Barack Obama, Trump trashed not only the 2015 agreement to curb Iran's nuclear designs but also the 2015 U.N. climate accords, which 195 countries signed here in Paris. That is why we are sweltering today.
As for those ducks, a grand plan to clean up the Seine for the Olympics altered its ecological balance. Much less natural organic matter in the water ruptured the food chain. A small part of a very big problem.
We need to understand the overall threat and what decent people with families and friends they cherish can do about it. Starting now. November is four months away.
