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.
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.
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.
