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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TUCSON — A photo gone viral of Donald Trump's cruel new America is sickening. Hooded police brutalize asylum seekers flown to El Salvador in blatant defiance of a federal judge's order by a kleptocrat U.S. president who has crowned himself king.

"Oopsie, too late," Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, the self-proclaimed "world's coolest dictator," posted with an amused emoji when the planes failed to turn around. He is detaining 260 Venezuelans indefinitely under harsh conditions for a price.

Marco Rubio retweeted that on X, Elon Musk's purveyor of hard-right hate. In the 2016 campaign, he reviled Trump and said Vladimir Putin rules Russia like a mafia boss. Now an errand-boy secretary of state, he helps his boss run America in the same way.

In 60 years of reporting abroad, I have never seen such clear and present danger. Today, the world sees a law-defying superpower with the ability to blow a chunk out of the planet and the economic clout to create global penury.

Trump's use of the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act, meant for wartime, to whip up fear and loathing over a bogus "border emergency" is a small part of it. Aided by hypocrite legislators and armed neo-Nazi nihilists, he is dismantling America at dizzying speed.

At home, cultists support his efforts to cripple Social Security and health care. Their own savings dwindle in market chaos as prices soar. The poorest and sickest suffer most. Essential services vanish to fund trillions in tax cuts for a wealthy few.

Abroad, he is making the world safe for Russian invasions, Chinese dominance, ultra-Zionist suppression of Palestine and more. NATO's next callup could be a defense of Canada or Denmark against U.S. colonial pretentions.

Trump and Musk are halfway through a coup d'etat. One feeds an insatiable, demented ego, seeing himself as a tough, wise monarch. The other, an über-rich Lex Luther with no hint of human empathy, raised in racist South Africa, wants to rule the universe.

Decent citizens, overwhelmed by the unthinkable and confused by divided Democratic factions, watch it all happen like deer blinded by headlights. Or simply tune it all out.

A popular groundswell is growing fast. Polls and focus groups reveal even many Republicans are furious that Trump is doing the opposite of what they expected. Town-hall protests remind lawmakers who pays them and who they are sworn to serve.

Still, this is drop-dead urgent. Big money, voter suppression and computer sabotage imperil free, fair elections — even as early as 2026. It is time to remember Samuel L. Jackson's alarm when the threat was only George W. Bush: "Wake the fuck up."

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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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