TUCSON — I used to say the only difference between 23 and dead is all in the mind. Now, a lot closer to the latter than the former, not so much. But today age looms large in an America facing its most crucial elections ever.

A recent Atlantic headline asked, “Why Do Such Elderly People Run America?” Good question. Lots of young people with fresh ideas and new skills see their options in November — two men, 150 years old between them — as total wastes of space.

But the writer, 38, lost me fast. He called Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders “three candidates divided by ideology but united in dotage.” Dotage? Webster defines that as “senile decay marked by decline of mental poise and alertness.” Fuck off, punk.

Ageism is a small-bore bias. Mostly, it reflects callow, shallow thinkers who generalize in data-clump shortcuts like their computers (which, BTW, their elders invented). Some people are couchbound rutabagas by 50; others remain brilliant into their 90s.

For the CEO of an imperiled “free world,” being old has value, even if he, or she, says “malarkey” for “bullshit.” Founding Fathers fixed the minimum age for president at 35 back when male life expectancy was near 38. They wanted the oldest bulls in the herd.

A long life reveals over time how confronting the present requires an understanding of the past. Diplomacy demands an acquired feel for reading faces and anticipating how action might trigger reaction. Situations vary; human nature remains constant.

Age isn’t Trump’s problem. He has been a self-obsessed lying cheat since childhood. Biden may not fire up audiences that expect entertaining bombast, but he excels at what matters now: calmly finding common ground at home and abroad.

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TUCSON — My favorite front page in a hometown paper splashes big letters across the top about a mysterious prowler. A small headline below says, “Two Dacron Women Feared Missing in Volcanic Disaster,” with a tiny subhead: “Japan Destroyed.” An arrow on a Pacific Ocean map is labeled, “Where Japan was formerly located.”

The National Lampoon’s Dacron Republic-Democrat in 1978 spoofed an obsession for “the local angle.” Today, I wouldn’t be surprised at something similar, for real, on my doorstep. America has never been so closely, and dangerously, focused on itself.

Transfixed by Donald Trump’s depredations at home, few Americans reflect on the world of pain his self-focused folly causes abroad: conflicts flare, poverty deepens, terrorism thrives, human rights vanish, trade wars cripple the global economy.

He shuns cooperation, not only to contain a highly contagious new virus likely to kill millions but also to mitigate climate collapse and sea change that are pushing humanity toward a die-off of billions.

Depending on Trump’s purpose, Xi Jinping is a brilliant transparent leader or a shameless cheat who hides evidence of a plague while robbing America blind. As a result, a wary China focuses on muscling aside America as world leader, one way or another.

Solid reporting abounds. The Washington Post won a Pulitzer for a series on how fast Earth is overheating. The New York Times’ prize package exposed Russia’s shadow wars — bombings, murder, bribes, disinformation — in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Yet a survey during Covid-19 isolation showed a slight increase in news readership while gaming and old TV reruns were off the charts. With so many choices for have-it-your-way news, people shape personal worldviews around their own prejudices.

In April, Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times stunned Americans with an unsparing account of how their country appears from the outside. He wrote:

“Over more than two centuries the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed toward the US until now: pity.

“However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.”

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TUCSON — Donald Trump, shaping fingers into a pistol at a 2016 Iowa rally, exulted: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” Today, it is as if he had blasted away in Manhattan with a machine gun.

For two months, he dismissed the clear and present Covid-19 threat, mocking it to crowds as yet another Democratic hoax. “It’s one person from China; we have it totally under control.” True believers put their lives at risk — and everyone else’s.

Now he rejects any blame in daily delusional ravings — fact-free self-focused hubris — as the virus kills in the tens of thousands. His past actions were perfect. His natural gift for science enabled him to see the pandemic coming before anyone.

“Depraved-heart murder,” Wikipedia says, is “a ‘depraved indifference’ to human life” that causes death” whether or not there is explicit intent to kill. It applies if “defendants commit an act even though they know their act runs an unusually high risk of causing death or serious bodily harm to a person.”

The case is clear-cut in America. And by scapegoating the World Health Organization, withholding funds it needs to thwart the pandemic and other killer diseases, Trump extends depraved indifference to an entire planet.

He imperiled the nation he swore to protect, ignoring his experts’ warnings as he fired up crowded rallies, thumbed inane tweets and golfed. He tried to stop sick U.S. citizens on a ship off California from landing. That, he said, would drive up infection statistics.

After visiting the CDC, Trump told Fox News that experts, and also Vice President Mike Pence, wanted to bring the people to shore, but he disagreed. “I like the numbers being where they are,” he said. “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault."

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COCHISE STRONGHOLD, Arizona — Up here where an Apache chief and an Army general once made peace meant to last, stirring views overlook a diminished America, a money-talks nation in the grip of newcomers who believe it belongs only to them.

Before the road narrows and climbs to forests and rocky peaks, I saw a sign on a shabby ranch house fence: “TRUMP — Keep America First.” In today’s lingo, that means send intruders back where they came from. Fair enough. Adios, dude.

My t-shirt had a different message. Along with a sepia tone photo of four carbine-wielding warriors in deerskin boots framed by an outline map of Arizona, it read in old-timey letters: “Homeland Security, Fighting Terrorism since 1492.”

Apaches and other tribes have been around for nearly a millennium. Spanish missionaries came in the 1500s. This was Mexico until 1853. Arizona has been a state only since 1912. We “white eyes” outsiders are the “aliens.”

Today, crisp piney air evokes Cochise’s time when cellphones were no-G smoke signals, tweets were for the birds and “fox” referred to a shifty carnivore that eagles ate for lunch. Land deeds were inconceivable. But not only snakes had forked tongues.

That 1871 treaty with the general soon fell apart as people moved West. Ranchers and settlers wanted land. After a renegade band killed a corrupt whiskey seller, the U.S. Cavalry mounted up. Blood spilled again for 15 more years.

I learned the history when I camped here as a kid. Since then, I’ve watched hubris, greed and stupidity too often misguide American foreign policy. Small incidents trigger big conflicts. At home and abroad, this is far worse than I’ve ever seen.

Arizona, once blue then red, is as politically purple as its majestic mountains. And it is a crucible of two heated issues as Trump tries to shape America in his own image: Who belongs; and who holds title to natural splendor, scarce water and mineral wealth.

On a break from isolation to avoid the killer virus Donald Trump allowed to run wild, I took a slow ride through Indian country and ranchland I knew in the 1960s.

The old whistlestop town of Willcox was mostly locked down, but at a sparse open-air market I met a crusty coot with a long straggly white beard in a shirt proclaiming him a Vietnam vet. He was still pissed that pacifists stopped America from finishing the job.

“I’m not worried about that virus,” he told me, with a dismissive wave, then hacked mightily. I skipped my usual routine — a handshake while asking for a name — and just wrote down Gabby. “I had the flu when I was a kid, and I figure I’m immune.”

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TUCSON — Let’s be clear. Deadly plague and deadlier politics put America at more risk than perhaps anything since the Civil War. Only a widespread awakening to reality can prevent COVID-19 from leaving permanent scars in a divided, diminished nation.

Donald Trump’s initial mocking of coronavirus — another Democratic hoax after impeachment failed — amounts to wholesale negligent manslaughter. As the toll inexorably climbs, it amounts to a crime against humanity.

As late as February 28, he told a crowded shoulder-to-shoulder rally, “Now the Democrats are politicizing this, and it is their new hoax.” Until mid-March, his message to Americans was be calm and buy stocks.

Now he exploits fear and suffering in daily primetime “press briefings,” as bald a display of demagogy as I have seen in a half-century of covering despots around the world. Do not be surprised if a Reichstag mysteriously catches fire before November.

If you’re new to the Mort Report, this is not what it is meant to be. I’m an up-close reporter who values credibility and objectivity earned over a lifetime. But nothing about today is normal. If seasoned journalists cannot say it straight, we are lost.

I am now back in Tucson where I started out, happy enough in the shadow of dramatic mountains, banging away on a keyboard as chili bubbles on the stove, yet burning to be out there exploring those colors and contours on the big world map by my desk.

Today, a grasping megalomaniac sees that map as a Monopoly board and cons his cultists into believing that he dominates it. Americans who oppose him focus on crisis at home, with scant attention to his global depredations that threaten human survival.

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