The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Mort Rosenblum
State Sen. Wendy Rogers is in a snit because so many people oppose her bill to rename historic Route 260 up north Donald J. Trump Highway. For one thing, that is pointless. Its present designation — General Crook Trail — is already close enough.
The idea of immortalizing Trump on the state map provokes intense pushback. Beside moral turpitude lurking in the Epstein files, vainglorious invasions, war crimes at sea, brutal immigration raids, grift and graft, he is cranking up heat on a sweltering planet.
And now he has declared all-out war on news media that insist on reporting observable truth.
I usually spend time at the annual book festival briefing reporters from back east about Arizona politics, far loonier than most realize. This year, I listened. Their inside dope on foreign entanglements and the Trump-led plot against America scared me witless.
Tim Weiner, whose masterful books probe the CIA and FBI, put it plainly: "We are two mistakes away from World War III." Trump is a Putin fanboy, he said, because he wants to be Putin. Like the others, he sees a dis-United States hurtling toward a cliff's edge.
Most reporters and analysts expect enough sleepwalking citizens to snap awake by November. But even if that happens, it would be only a first step. Rogue Republicans are playing for keeps, beavering away to skew elections. We should be very afraid.
Trump's shifting gobbledygook about his Iran "excursion" ignores its massive global impact. He is distracted by amassing money, endorsing cultists, savaging the Kennedy Center and making the White House a gaudy satire of the Sun King's Versailles Palace.
Bad as its fundamentalist hardliners are, Iran was years away from being a direct threat to America, nuclear or otherwise. If they eventually built a bomb that could cross the Atlantic, its leaders know, an immediate riposte would leave Iran in smoking ruins.
But now warning lights flash red. America faces likely cyber sabotage and random terror. Before Trump's toadies gutted U.S. intelligence, experts said vulnerable targets include contractors that build missiles and drones — mainly Raytheon in Tucson.
Trump's simplistic mind reduces 92 million people in a complex millennia-old society to evil towelheads chanting "Death to America." He unleashed "Epic Fury" during peace talks. Vengeful new leaders plan lasting, crippling pain in response.
He reviles the 2015 accord that brought Iran back into the wider world because "Barack Hussein Obama" brokered it. He insults and threatens NATO partners for cowardly ingratitude, unaware that America forged the alliance in 1949 for its own protection.
NATO's charter requires a united response to an attack on any member. It was invoked only once, after 9/11. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, fresh from a humiliating visit to Washington, said last week the attack on Iran had nothing to do with NATO.
There is too much to summarize. Zero in on Arizona.
Wendy Rogers bases praise for Trump largely on another 2015 landmark accord he rejected, claiming a great victory for America: the U.N. Paris climate summit. He called it a China hoax to cripple the U.S. economy and its fossil fuel boom.
And now he takes credit for the Obama-Joe Biden success in making America energy independent, with growing exports of oil and gas.
Just look outside to see the result of climate denial. The Star's headline last Sunday said record heat puts the Colorado River closer to crisis. The week's forecast: "Dangerously hot conditions with high temperatures of 100 to 108 expected." It is only March.
Book fair habitués often call Tucson's the best anywhere, especially for authors who dig cars out of snow to reach an airport. Surely, the most fun. The wide range of titles and enthusiast crowds are a big reason. But also, those mountains, wildflowers and gardens.
I reluctantly skipped uplifting and amusing events to focus on calamities that await if Trump's demagogy prevails.
Jonathan Karl, ABC's Washington bureau chief, set the tone at the opening dinner. He was at Tienanmen Square in 1989 when Chinese authorities cracked down on protests over corruption, inflation and lost freedoms. Police killed an estimated 2,000.
It was captured in a single timeless image: a lone man stood in front of a tank column, defiantly staring down a cannon aimed at him. Jeff Widener of the Associated Press, injured and nearly out of film, took the photo and smuggled it out of China.
Karl linked that scene to January 6, 2021, when he saw insurgents storm the Capitol, smashing cameras and attacking journalists who stayed throughout to document irrefutable proof of treacherous high crimes. Trump pardoned perpetrators as patriots.
"Bearing witness" is a cliché, but still. Trustworthy journalists' eyes and ears are essential to protect democracy. They are futile unless enough sentient citizens step up while they still have the right to vote.
An overriding threat is reflected in Rogers' effort to immortalize Trump. For me, the most disturbing Book Festival session was my conversation with Alan Weisman about his new book, "Hope Dies Last."
However geopolitics play out, nothing will matter if heedless humans cannot curb wasteful habits. At the rate we are going, his research estimates, we will need another three if not four Earths. And the only one we have is already on the edge.
Despite his last name, George Crook was no Trump. He spent his last years opposing unjust treatment of Indians. At a trial in 1879, he swayed a federal judge to affirm that some (not all) rights of U.S. citizens extended to Native Americans.
Late in life, the old general reflected on how much people who lived close to the land knew about protecting it.
The General Crook Trail, built in the 1870s from Cottonwood to Eagar, was a dirt track for military supply wagons back when settlers needed protections from Indians who had different ideas about "manifest destiny."
Lawmaking has always been controversial in Arizona. A newspaper publisher in the late 1800s once wrote that the flooded Gila, Salt and tributary rivers isolated Phoenix, thus sparing Arizonans from the tender mercies of the Territorial Legislature.
Today, even the Colorado may soon be too low to power hydroelectric dams or supplement dwindling water to Arizona and California. Dispatches at mortreport.org dig deeper into parallels on a global scale.
In fact, "Trump" might be apt name for that stretch of Route 260. At the festival, I consulted Gregory McNamee, my go-to source for old lore on Arizona (and most everywhere else going back to Ancient Greece). He knows that road well.
It climbs to 7,000 feet and drops sharply, with perilous hairpin turns through narrow passes. As Greg noted, a single thoughtless turn of the wheel can send a vehicle — or a metaphoric democracy — plunging off a cliff.
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