PARIS - Two words sum up the existential threat to America. The first is obvious: Trump. The second is a catchall noun so vague it has no meaning, and yet it enables a would-be despot to twist truth and tie a superpower into knots: media.

Excellent news sources abound for people who find them amid a blizzard of bullshit motivated by profit or propaganda. Instead, many pluck dubious snippets off the internet and react with all the reflection of invertebrates stuck by a pin. For them, it is all “the media.”

Donald Trump understands this. If one reporter gets something wrong - or, more often, gets something right that annoys him - he dismisses “the media” with his trademark label: fake news. That works for him because of a worsening industry trend that helped put him in office.

Newspapers that once informed America are still with us, adapted to digital delivery, but most are shadows of their former selves. They replace solid up-close reporting with thumb-sucking at a distance or word sausages made up of news bits from slipshod common sources.

Now GateHouse is about to swallow Gannett and use its familiar brand name. America's two largest chains plan to merge into a Frankenstein's monster of more than 260 dailies and 300 weeklies in 47 states. That, they say, will “enhance quality journalism.” Talk about blowing credibility right off the bat.

MORE

PARIS - Ilhan Omar might have been one of those hollow-eyed Somali kids at the edge of survival I saw back in the early 1990s, covering humanity's ugly underside for the Associated Press.

The world had ignored foreseeable famine. A warlord despot battled with murderous rivals, all demanding chunks of whatever was left to plunder. Heading inland from Mogadishu, I wrote:

“On the blacktop road to Baidoa, a sunbaked corpse lies in the center, the chest emptied by vultures. It might have been a bullet, a bus or hunger. In Somalia, no one stops to find out.

“Scores of thousands have died this year, another 2,000 with every sunrise. A million may follow. But beyond the numbing statistics, the impact comes one death at a time.

“In Baidoa, Amina Sheikh Mohammed, a nurse, stood in the yard of a feeding center and told a visitor that six children had died that day. A man spoke softly in her ear, and her face clouded.

“'Make that seven,' she said.”

Omar was born in 1982, the youngest of seven siblings. When she was two, her mother died. After her father, a teacher, saw Somalia falling apart beyond repair, he led the kids on a harrowing trek to spend four years in Dadaab, a hellhole refugee camp in Kenya.

The family made it to New York in 1992 and sought asylum, the way my father's family escaped Russian mayhem in 1921. Omar became a U.S. citizen in 2000, at 17, six years before Melania Trump.

Decent Minnesotans put her in the state legislature. Hijab notwithstanding, she won 78 percent of the vote. After a single term of watching her in action, they sent her to Congress.

It is not likely Ilhan Omar hates her new homeland. And it is no surprise that she reviles Trump, who evokes the sort of ruthless demagogy and blind greed that pushed Somalia into a “shithole.”

No one still reading this needs a recap of Trump's cynical jihad against Omar. Yet a close look at how he distorts her words and twists their context shows depraved indifference to truth.

MORE

TOURTOUR, France — Rockets' red glare, bursting in air, lit up faces of awe-struck kids waving candles in paper bags on sticks. Parents stashed wine bottles to ooh and ahh at lights cascading down the old church tower. Fireworks here, up close and personal, are spectacular.

Afterward, this hilltop Provence village drank and danced late into the night. Visitors retrieved cars parked every which way under roadside sycamores, without a glance from the few indulgent cops. The next day, every TV blared the parade in Paris.

The jets, wingtips almost touching, trailed blue, white, red low over the Champs-Elysées. As always, the Foreign Legion Pioneers stole the show: bearded bruisers in buffalo-hide aprons gripping axes, not guns. Since 1831, they have cleared the way for commandos quelling mayhem in far-flung corners of empire.

Emmanuel Macron stood as tall as a short guy can in an open jeep, flanked by the Garde Republicaine in gleaming silver helmets on horses. His honored guest was Angela Merkel, leader of Germany, which invaded France twice in the last century.

Last year's invitee, an American president who wanted his own show of military might at home, missed the point. Troops and tanks are just the backdrop to a family affair that fetes what Charles de Gaulle called une certaine idée de la France.

That certain idea seems secure on Bastille Day, with its echoes of Victor Hugo: “France, France, without you the world would be alone.” But the country so many of us outsiders love and hate with equal passion is fast morphing into something else.

MORE

PARIS - I've struggled not to say this, even to myself, but Democrats stand a growing chance of condemning the world to Donald Trump's impossible dream: a greed-based oligarchy in America with authoritarian rule bent on stamping out truth.

Too many Americans see democracy as a spectator sport, and they obsess on inside baseball - domestic issues - rather than real-world crises. If candidates continue to snipe over details, the worst president ever could win by default.

In Hong Kong, two million people just jammed the streets, some facing 10 years in prison for storming government headquarters, to force concessions from China. That is as if 90 million people marched on Congress and the White House.

In the United States, half of eligible voters don't even bother to cast ballots. Among those who do, Republicans rally behind the party choice, no matter who it is. They share ideology. Democrats are prone to stay home if not inspired by a candidate.

“If this doesn't change, it doesn't matter who the candidate is,” author Max Brooks observed recently on Bill Maher's Real Time. “If we don't come together now, we're dead.”

America is now beyond politics. An unhinged megalomaniac thwarts a global effort to keep Earth habitable, and he fans conflict that could trigger unstoppable war. At his elbow, John Bolton outdoes Peter Sellers as Doctor Strangelove. Yet the last Democrat debate, a choreographed pageant extravaganza, ignored the outside world.

MORE

NAPLES, Italy - You can still get to Sesame Street from here and just about everywhere else in spite of Donald Trump’s attempt to wall it off. So as Big Bird might have it, this dispatch about countless global crises is brought to you by the letter “I.”

Put aside 25 other letters in the alphabet and consider only what is happening behind that single capitalized vowel.

Iran, Iraq and Israel are at risk of accidental Armageddon. India’s demagogic Hindu nationalist leader plays chicken with Pakistan. Indonesia faces climate calamities and Islamist zealotry. Iceland, warming fast, may soon be Rockland. Ireland now has a border to protect.

And here in the heart of an Atlantic Alliance that just commemorated victory over Nazis and Fascists 75 years ago, easy-going Italy is making a sharp right turn. Matteo Salvini, vice premier, is gaining popularity fast by blaming Italian woes on migrants and liberals.

 This is no time for America to obsess about itself. Yet the pronoun, “I,” and its inseparable partner, “me,” define thinking today in the White House, the Senate and among much of an apathetic electorate. A cohesive worldview has sunk into whatever.

I often liken Trump to Mussolini, but even many Italians who fear a return to fascism say that is unfair to Il Duce. He was no fool, they argue. When he put Italy first it was more than an excuse to bilk the poor and fatten up the rich. Nonetheless, he ended up hanged by his heels.

 Viewed from Europe, Trump seems more like a Charlie Chaplin caricature of Hitler, a puffed-up martinet enraptured with himself. But unlike Hollywood’s Little Dictator, Trump has the means to trigger unstoppable conflicts and thwart global efforts to keep Earth habitable.

 It is too early to worry much about Italy, with its entrenched family values and uncanny ability to get through just about anything as long as the coffee and grappa hold out. Those I-states in the Middle East are the real threat.

MORE