TUCSON — Nightmare plots don't get crazier: Mars-Obsessed Muskrat Attacks With a Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight! With a cup of tariff-free Colombian coffee and a world map, imagine a revived American dream that extends beyond borders.

A groundswell of outrage building fast across the country offers hope. Whether can rescue an imperiled United States and a planet on the boil depends on how many Americans see global reality as it is.

One syntax-challenged Elon Musk X-tweet rises above so much other insanity: "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead." The agency, he contends, is evil and criminal.

Seeing that, I thought of the colorful painting on my office wall in France. Mobutu Sese Seko and two other presidents wave to a cheering crowd from a Lincoln convertible in 1967 to herald a short-lived "democracy": the United States of Central Africa.

A Kinshasa street artist painted it on a cut-open, stretched flour sack marked "U.S. Agency for International Development" with its logo of clasped hands.

The CIA helped murder leftist Patrice Lumumba, one more case of foreign policy losing hearts and minds across the world. But the agency John F. Kennedy created to relieve poverty, protect health and build infrastructure made Americans the good guys.

During Mobutu's 32 years as Washington's son of a bitch and chaos that followed, at least 10 million Congolese — perhaps double that; no one was counting — have been killed in war and rebellion or died of malnutrition and preventable diseases.

The New York Times just displayed photos from the lake country near Goma. It was what I saw in 1967 and in 1994 when Rwandan refugees fled genocide. USAID workers helped victims of new mass killings, rape and starvation.

USAID likely does more than anything else to curb migration, terrorism, runaway pathogens and Chinese hegemony. Its $38 billion budget in 2024 was well below 1 percent of federal spending. Americans spent nearly four times as much on pets.

Over the decades, the agency has saved millions of lives abroad while protecting Americans at home. Today, the dreaded Ebola virus is spreading in Uganda. USAID was working to ensure no one carried it on international flights. No longer.

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TUCSON — When elephants fight, an old Swahili saying goes, the grass suffers. I've seen what that means since the 1960s, covering coups and upheaval in places Donald Trump calls shitholes. We are all seeing it already in America.

As Republicans war among themselves for favor from a trumpeting old bull, workaday families face a mire of pachyderm plop. The nation's grass roots run deep. Still, its character, decency, prosperity and good sense all hang in the balance.

When a threat comes with tanks and artillery, civilians put their lives on the line to defend democracy. In America, people only need to show up at the polls. In November, a third of those eligible did not bother to do even that.

A would-be king surpassed all expectations during his tragicomic coronation. The Clintons chortled onstage behind him at his "Gulf of America" declaration. But Elon Musk's later Seig Heil! salute fired up homegrown neo-Nazis and sent shivers abroad.

Trump again took the United States out of the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization. Those acts of blind hubris alone imperil countless lives on a planet his mega-billionaire backers intend to ravage with selfish abandon.

There is no border emergency. America badly needs more labor and entrepreneurs who create jobs. It has plenty of room for screened newcomers who arrive at its doors. Yet it repels families fleeing climate calamity and conflict for which it bears heavy blame.

Trump has frozen vital foreign aid that helps families stay home, where most would rather be. The European Union, overcrowded, pays Libyan pirates to deter new arrivals. Desperate migrants trapped in limbo are a ticking human time bomb.

Bludgeoning allies with high tariffs raises prices at home, and it enables slashed taxes for the rich. Tactics such as strong-arming Colombia into accepting two planeloads of 160 deportees are turning that "shining city on a hill" into a despised Gomorrah.

Countries that admired a nation which did so much to pick up the pieces after World War II now see tweets like this from Trump's puerile new press secretary: "Yesterday, Mexico accepted a record 4 deportation flights in 1 day!" America is not great again.

Hubert Vedrine, a former French foreign minister, captured the mood in what remains of a free world committed to democracy and a common front against global crises: "Trump is like an asteroid headed to Earth."

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TUCSON — The world honored Jimmy Carter in the Capitol rotonda, which a deadly insurrection besieged four years ago. He had spent most of his 100 years waging peace and working to keep an imperiled planet habitable for humanity.

At the National Cathedral, Joe Biden lauded his old friend's character, a trait he himself displayed during a single term. He led a Covid-crippled nation to historic prosperity while keeping embers his predecessor left behind from flaring into global war.

Both men belong atop Mount Rushmore. Donald Trump belongs on a forgotten molehill elsewhere in the Dakotas. Mount Flushmore.

Carter, though scorned at first, departed with gratitude and glory. A spiritual man of deep faith, you could imagine him choosing the moment — just weeks before Trump's self-deifying Inauguration — to snap a misguided nation out of its stupor.

Many with short memories still disparage Biden. He will likely be gone before history makes the record clear. But his eulogy set the tone for the fight ahead he plans to join from the sidelines. "The greatest of sins," he said, "is abuse of power."

Early signs provide hope that concerted, sustained action can stop the United States of America from sinking into Trumpistan.

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TUCSON — World War II allies laughed off Tokyo Rose. We howled at Hanoi Hannah's clumsy agitprop in Vietnam. Now the United States is about to face global derision. Donald Trump's choice to run Voice of America is Arizona's own Kool-Aid Kari.

This will be brief. Americans need some time out for family, food and football. But day one in Trumpistan is three weeks away. Of all the creatures in a bestiary that shames a diminished nation, Kari Lake is hardly the worst. Still, she epitomizes the lot.

First, the big picture.

We old guys recall "His Master's Voice," the ubiquitous logo for RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, founded in 1919 as the pioneer in broadcast communications. A dog named Nipper peers quizzically into the huge trumpet-shaped speaker of a wind-up gramophone.

RCA, among others, marketed a one-way version of reality. Today, have-it-your-way "news" is everywhere, and big money spews big lies nonstop. Much of America, like ol' Nipper, is transfixed.

We all know the domestic impact of a weaponized X-Twitter. A multitude of rightwing "influencers" twist truth while guessing about distant events few of them understand. An un-silent majority equipped with hard facts can limit the damage at home.

But consider the irreparable harm if a boorish, self-obsessed America turns its back on the wider world.

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