EXTRA: Boorish Boar on a Muskrat Ramble

AMPUS, France — Hulking boar called sangliers and assorted rodents dominated high-country Provençal fauna when I came here in the 1980s. The pigs trampled rock terraces and uprooted plants. Rats infested homes and barns. They were no big deal.

Olive groves, amber waves of grain and vineyards thrived with reliable winter cold snaps and tolerably hot summers. Rivers swelled in spring. Snowmelt recharged the eau de montagne subsurface water that Marcel Pagnol made famous.

All creatures great and small ate their fill. Hunter friends grilled sanglier chops on olivewood coals. Miranda the cat kept rodents on the run. We barely noticed early shifts in biodiversity as nature began culling humans from the mix.

Today, Porcus trumpus and Rattus muskiana, invasive subspecies from North America, threaten Provence and everywhere else. The risk goes far beyond ecological balance. Donald Trump and Elon Musk have my vote as the two most dangerous men on Earth.

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Musk's "interview" with Trump on his X'd-out Twitter chilled my spine. With opposite extremes of narcissism in tandem atop a perverted Republican party in a nuclear-tipped superpower, they pose a menace that defies imagination.

After news reports mocked technical glitches and quoted snippets, I parsed every word of their two-hour ramble. It smacked of past self-annointed saviors intent on reshaping societies in their own image. But this was hardly Hitler hobnobbing with Mussolini.

Trump was an obnoxious frat boy telling an enraptured wingman how he would grab America by her privates. Musk praised Trump's tough-guy courage. He offered to help him save the nation from communists and a flood of lawless, often vicious, immigrants.

One exchange defined their philosophy. Rich guys reign. Trump was almost giddy over Musk's approach to workers. If they get uppity, fire the lot with a group email. They are expendable widgits in a production line.

Both thrive on adultation and the ability to ignore rules, no matter the consequences for everyone else. Their political positions, shifting over the years, are based on ambition, not principles.

Each is enamored of his own perceived leadership skills. Their approach to the ecosphere, global security, crypto-influenced monetary policy, deregulation, taxes, public health and personal liberties favor the selfish. And it hastens inevitable endgame.

But Trump, an increasingly addled ignoramus, sees only the mirror in front of him. He is a useful tool for Musk, who is long on brains but short on heart and soul. Trump loves money. Musk's billions are chips in an intragalactic Risk game he intends to win.

The Twitter takeover cost Musk $44 billion, but he got his own globe-girdling megaphone. He dismissed ethics and standards people, then scrapped the media office. Press queries got a turd emoji, easy enough to interpret: "I'm Elon Musk. Eat shit."

Advertisers threatened to cancel after antisemitic and hate-speech posts last year. "Go fuck yourself," he told them. "Is that clear? I hope so." When companies decided last month to boycott X for tilting right, he sued for unfair collusion. They backed off.

The Trump website where I found the "interview" noted 4.5 million views. Even discounting the times Trump replayed it, that's a lot. Goebbels had only radio and a few newspapers. Imagine an AI-equipped Musk as minister of propaganda.

Trump is nearing a sell-by date, in dubious health at 78. Still, even if he has to step down, he could begin to put the Republicans' Project 2025 into practice for an articulate vice president nearly half his age, just as truth-averse and wedded to his party line.

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Climate change worries me most. Trump denies it. Maybe oceans will rise a eigth-inch in 400 years, he said, adding: "Then there'll be more beachfront property." Musk chuckled indulgently before a gentle pushback.

In 30 or 40 years, Musk said, 1000 ppm of CO2 in the air — just over twice the current level — would cause headaches. More would make it hard to breathe. He did not talk about what might happen before then. Or after. Guys like him would figure it out.

I just listened to a lecture by Paul Ehrlich, at 92 still trying to protect underpinnings of the world's food supply. Neither party is doing anything significant enough, he said, "but at least Democrats are not working hard to make the world end faster."

Ehrlich, an ecologist, cited an exhaustive landmark study released in 2021 by economist Sir Partha Dasgupta, funded by the British government. It concluded that Earth could sustain 3.5 billion people indefinitely with a standard of living similar to Mexico's.

"There are already more than eight billion," Ehrlich said, "and everyone is striving for a Hollywood standard of living."

Three years later, Dasgupta's bleak picture is darker. Climate collapse worsens at alarming rates: acidifying seas warm and rise; freak storms savage unexpected places at unpredictable times. Deforestation, desertification and floods devastate food crops.

Concerted global efforts can mitigate, if not reverse, the impact. But America needs to be in the forefront.

For Trump, anything green besides cash endangers his wont to let fossil fuel magnates befoul the air we breathe as long as they bankroll him. Musk tells others, and likely himself, that electric vehicles are more than one flawed facet of a partial solution.

As Musk says, oil reserves are finite. But a massive use of electricity requires mining for metals and minerals that destroys not only natural beauty and water sources but also land needed for food crops. Time is running out fast to find sustainable compromise.

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"Fact-checking" Trump is futile. His entire narrative is 180 degrees off truth. The chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, almost totally because of him, is now somehow Kamala Harris's fault. His economy was perfect until Joe Biden's mishandling of Covid-19.

And the border. His cruel family separations limited crossings. Then a bogus Title 42 health threat shut down entry points. Aides blocked his idea to fend off migrants with gunfire or to bomb cartel bases in false-flag attacks to be blamed on some other country.

In a delirious exchange with Musk, he said that under Biden more than 20 million migrants stormed America, mostly sent by governments around the world that emptied out prisons and insane asylums. Murders and rapists now terrorize America.

Musk waffled. He emigrated from South Africa via Canada to strike it rich. America, he said, needs an influx of qualified people. Still, he echoed Trump's false alarm about a chaotic surge. "In another four years," he said, "we may not have a country left."

The United States makes up less than 5 percent of the world population, he said. If all refugees flooded across its borders, its 340 million inhabitants would be overwhelmed. That is ridiculous, and it threw me. The man is not dumb.

In fact, if all people fleeing conflict, climate collapse and poverty came to America, its population would double, then increase exponentially by the year. All wealthy-world borders are besieged by families that, for the most part, would rather stay home.

I suspect Musk knows that. He is hardly gullible or a blindered Republican.

In 2017, he quit the White House Science Advisory Team when Trump rejected the Paris climate accords. "Climate change is real," he said. He says he voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. When he backed Ron DeSantis in the primaries, Trump called him "a bullshit artist."

Musk now says he endorsed Trump after seeing a strong leader bravely stand up to raise a fist after taking a bullet for democracy. There could be other reasons. I thought of Rasputin, who implanted himself behind the throne to manipulate a weak king.

The border problem is push, not pull. Trump slashed aid to countries he calls shitholes. Terror groups he claims to have eliminated now bedevil much of Africa. People flee from dictators he coddles. Many face starvation because of climate change he denies.

Reality is easy to check.

Harris's job as "border czar" was to work with Central American governments to stem the flow. She has made significant headway. Aid that Trump stopped was restored to reduce poverty and help suppress violence. But results will take time to evaluate.

Authorative studies say the U.S. economy needs four million new immigrant workers a year. On Biden's watch, southern border officials tallied 8.2 million "encounters" as of April: legal entries and migrants who were refused entry but returned multiple times.

Biden's stop-gap decree earlier this year to process asylum-seekers and migrants at ports of entry cut entries by up to 90 percent. Then a bipartisan agreement tailored to please Republicans was ready to be signed into law.

Trump told Republicans to block it. The "border crisis" is his signature issue. Every image of families trapped in hellish limbo trying to enter America incites more fear and loathing, for which he blames Biden.

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Enigmatic as he is, Musk's innovations have done much for America. The trouble is sideline activity, such as unofficial diplomacy. Musk circles the globe to market Teslas. He has a plant in China, where he recently met top officials for undisclosed talks.

He is a regular in Moscow. He visited Vladimir Putin early in the war to push his solution: Ukraine should stop resisting. Last September he met with top-level Russians, ostensibly to talk about space flights, which prompted a Rachel Maddow tweet:

"This is an American citizen reportedly taking advice from the Russian government about how to make sure America's ally loses this war against Russia. How is this happening?"

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently tangled with social media platforms, mainly X, for fueling deadly far-right riots. Musk had posted, "Civil war is inevitable." He keyed a one-word retort to a tough speech by Starmer: "Insane."

In the European Union, X faces hefty fines for misinformation and hate speech. But hefty is relative for a man worth a quarter-trillion dollars. His response was a meme that said: “TAKE A BIG STEP BACK AND LITERALLY, FUCK YOUR OWN FACE!"

Most heat comes in America, where Musk has chosen himself to be arbiter of free speech. He condemns censorship while muzzling "content" and comment that offend him. As elections approach, X spews out distortion.

Years ago, I began noticing Musk's haughty disregard for the press. He did not distinguish between hired PR flacks and reporters who asked questions rather than parrot his words. Like Trump, he berated offending journalists with crass insults.

Today, countless books about him range from Walter Isaacson's essential biography to one I don't plan to read: "Elon Musk and the Quest for a Fantastic Future."

Musk's SpaceX missions are part of that future. But as a longtime NASA insider told me, space exploration is a vital national interest best not outsourced to mercurial private contractors. In any case, my worry is an increasingly perilous present.

In late July, an X wit provided a foretaste of what might follow with unleashed AI. His voice-cloned video began: "I, Kamala Harris, am your Democrat candidate for president because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility at the debate." Then it got worse.

Musk retweeted it, and it logged 130 million views. He later explained it was a parody. I, for one, am not laughing.

For now, Musk amounts to a quirky gadfly with a very loud voice and very big following. But if Porcus trumpus and Rattus muskiana infest the White House, don't count on escaping their impact on a Provence mountainside — or anywhere else.