A Way Out of This
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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Donald Trump's juggernaut can be stopped. Only a minority loves him. Those who fear him need only see him as he is, a puffed-up malevolent buffoon behind an Oz-wizard curtain. He has no plan beyond plunder and scratching the itch of an insatiable ego.
But reversing the decades-old trend toward plutocracy that Trump exploits is a gargantuan challenge.
By 2028, elections may be too rigged to matter. Fascists move fast. They must be thwarted with lawsuits, protests and boycotts. Solid reporting is crucial. Public servants from congressmen to county judges need to know who they are sworn to serve.
In a wired world, everyone has access to hard facts that expose bullshit. Yet in America today, a maxim that predates Machiavelli stands in the way: There is none so blind as he who will not see. With so much at stake, ignorance is no excuse. Apathy is desertion.
Nationwide rallies are growing. Courageous jurists, public officials, scientists, reporters, educators and others stand firm. As reality bites, resistance builds. Trump's vicious retribution and inhumane cruelty repulse many. That is not yet enough.
Just take Serbia, once a piece of Tito's authoritarian Yugoslavia, where people now fight to preserve a fledgling parliamentary republic. It is a candidate to join the European Union after centuries of outside rule and the long reign of Slobodan Milosevic.
A shoddy new train station facade in Novi Sad collapsed in November, killing 16. Before long, 500,000 mostly young people flooded streets in the capital and across Serbia to berate President Aleksandar Vucic. That equates to 30 million Americans.
This month, students bicycled 13 days to Strasbourg, seeking a European Parliament investigation of official corruption. One sign, pointedly in English, read: "You warned us not to make a sound, Now hear our footsteps shake the ground."
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Countless reasons explain why so many young Americans with the most to lose opted for a can't-win candidate, fell for transparent hypocrisy or did not bother to vote. As reality bites, Trump is fast losing support across the board.
His ratings on the economy sink along with families' savings. Absurd tariffs loom. At chest-beating "press briefings" with handpicked flacks, he claims stock markets thrive. The Dow is down 12 percent since January. The dollar lost 10 percent against the euro.
After his attacks on Jerome Powell at the Federal Reserve, seasoned analysts predicted recession, if not worse, in the coming months. He demanded interest rate cuts to dope the markets, heedless of long-term danger. Then he flipflopped again. What next?
Janet Yellen, Biden's treasury secretary after chairing the Fed, told CNN that entrenched inflation dates from Trump's ruinous Covid denial. The Economist, she noted, called America's recovery "the envy of the world."
Her conclusion was unambiguous: Trump has caused "the worst self-inflicted wound that I have ever seen an administration impose on a well-functioning economy."
Abroad, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu humiliate the alleged master dealmaker. Each doubles down with vicious onslaughts despite his pressure on Ukrainians and Palestinians to capitulate as the price for peace.
Grasping designs on Canada, Greenland and Panama horrify even many Republicans. They make foes among America's friends. China quickly fills the trade and aid vacuum but ignores the human rights and freedoms that America championed.
Yet Trump diverts attention to his failings with the old Machiavellian ploy. It served Hitler well and now resonates among many Americans. Blame those foreign hordes. "The Other."
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Republicans exploit a made-up border emergency with preposterous distortion. Trump's illegal executive overreach destroys countless lives and upends the basic values embedded in the Constitution.
Domestic tranquility and world stability depend on presidents who keep America on a steady course. They correct what they see as their predecessors' failings without divisive rancor and then help successors stay clear of troubled waters.
Bipartisan border policies based on reality are a key element of this. But here is Trump's idea of a holiday message to the nation he promised to unify:
"Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters back into our country."
After a slam at "WEAK AND INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials," he focused on to his favorite obsession:
"Sleepy Joe Biden purposely allowed Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in the history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America...by far, our WORST and most incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing..."
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For the record, compare Trump's first 100 days to what Biden accomplished overall to restore sanity and stability in three months despite a Republican stonewall. Then zero in on the border "invasion."
Amy Pope, now director-general of the U.N. International Office for Migration, advised Barack Obama and Biden. They turned back more people at the border than Trump did in his first term while allowing in refugees after careful screening in embassies abroad.
Her piece in Foreign Affairs, "Migration Can Work for All," put Trump's bogus invasion into global perspective. The U.N. estimates 43 million people qualify as refugees, and far more flee their homes as migrants — some starving, others in search of a better life.
Nearly 3,000 people have died since 2014 trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Ten times as many drowned in the Mediterranean. In 2023 alone, climate disasters displaced 26.4 million people, more than those escaping conflict.
Under Trump, those numbers will skyrocket. In 2017, he spurred on climate collapse by rejecting the Paris accords in 2015. That same year, he canceled the Iran nuclear deal, which he is now trying to revive after he sparked a decade of Middle East mayhem.
In 2008, 90 percent of people stopped along the U.S. southern border were Mexican. Today, two-thirds come from more than 100 countries, many from Bangladesh, India and China. Some sneak in. Most head straight to the nearest uniformed officer.
The solution is higher quotas and faster processing rather than ignorant catchall slander of destitute people willing to work hard at jobs that need filling, pay taxes and send money home to help families survive where they are.
The United States relies on "irregular" migrant labor for 70 percent of its agriculture. Early in the pandemic, 45 percent of meatpacking workers had no papers. Demands are similar in construction, health care and hospitality services.
Billions wasted on destructive penetrable barriers, cruel lawless roundups and military deportations could build mechanisms to match demand with supply. But Trump's "emergency" wins him votes while rewarding authoritarians and big-business backers.
The French have a word for Trump's approach to immigration: ratissage. The root of it is rake, not rat. Thugs on the public payroll round up anyone suspicious, even from churches or schools, including naturalized citizens and hapless tourists.
Victims can spend weeks, if not far longer, without due process in privately owned detention centers. Many are treated like hardened criminals, poorly fed and denied outside contact. The longer they stay, the more profit they generate.
The few cases that come to light cause outrage. As a result, official secrecy prevails over Kafkaesque lunacy. A Newsweek report just popped up on my screen about two German girls on a world tour after leaving high school.
They landed in Honolulu with valid visas and clean records. But they had booked no accommodation. Some dolt assumed they were planning to work. They spent two days in prison garb on moldy mattress with foul food in a cell with hardcore criminals.
At the extreme, some long-term detainees attempt suicide in despair.
The case against Trump should be ironclad after that Oval Office bro-fest with President Nayib Bukele. The self-styled world's coolest dictator, smug in a plush chair, said he could not return a man the administration admits was sent to El Salvador by mistake.
Watch the attached video. It is impossible to capture in words. As a warmup, Stephen Miller, at his comic-opera worst, crowed over a 9-0 Supreme Court order for the man to be brought back. That, he claimed without explanation, was a victory for Trump.
Bukele lectured America on why it must, like him, savage human rights to protect decent people. Trump nodded and heaped on praise. If a U.S. citizen hits an old lady on the head with a baseball bat, he asked, why not ship him to foreign jailors?
Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said Washington is paying El Salvador $15 million to manhandle and imprison deportees.
The spectacle defined Trump the would-be dictator as plainly as if he had stumbled through a Ted talk with a script written by his incompetent and law-averse aides, mostly plucked off Fox "News" or hate-mongering podcasts.
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Immigration — people on the move — is only one vital aspect in a war-ravaged world desperately staving off climatic endgame. No country can be "first" when existential crises transcend all lines on a world map.
"Too often we participate in the globalization of indifference," Pope Francis once said. "May we strive instead to live global solidarity."
The contrast was stunning at Easter in Rome. Some of Francis's last words were wasted on JD Vance, a man with a forked silver tongue and an orderly brain but no discernible moral compass. He could well be an even worst president than Trump.
Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019 yet when it comes to charity for the poor, weak and meek, he is more apostate than apostle.
Functioning democracy demands leaders with a firm grip on present truth and past reality who put the people they serve above their own interests. If they don't, citizens need to replace them. Walt Kelly, Pogo's creator, knew that well.
Kelly's enemy-is-us line is a play on a U.S. general's wartime remark: the enemy is ours. He used it on a 1970 Earth Day poster to warn against pollution that was already fouling the environment.
"Malarkey" is no silly old guy's word that marked Biden as past his sell-by date. During Sen. Joe McCarthy's fearmongering in the 1950s, Kelly's character, Simple J. Malarkey, skewered him as an unhinged threat to democracy.
Back then, it took only one exasperated outburst from an attorney for the Army to snap citizens awake: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, Sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
In the end, making America great again comes down to that. Simple human decency.
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