If they ever created a “Thelma and Louise” award for most spectacular launch into the political abyss, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens and President Donald Trump would surely be the hands-down winners.

They are both first-time politicians who astounded their more experienced opponents and won election to office in 2016. Both claimed a nonexistent popular mandate to destroy and rebuild their respective governance systems. And less than a year into their terms, both have spectacularly self-destructed.

Greitens is now fighting for his political life because of a 2015 sex scandal. Republicans in the Legislature have abandoned him, and he’s now the subject of an investigation by the St. Louis circuit attorney.

Because of comments Trump made last week, countries around the world are now contacting their respective U.S. embassies to ask whether they qualify for the president’s designation of “shithole.”

Trump’s latest gaffe follows remarks he reportedly made last month expressing his belief that Haitians “all have AIDS” and worrying that Nigerian immigrants in this country might never “go back to their huts.”

He has aligned himself with white supremacists. His racially insensitive tweets and verbal taunts are legendary. As much as congressional Republicans may try to support his agenda, Trump undermines them at every turn.

Likewise, Greitens has squandered the overwhelming Republican majority he enjoys in both houses of the Legislature, largely by repeatedly insulting his colleagues as corrupt, lazy and ineffective to burnish his own public image. He berates them for lax accountability while keeping his own activities secret and refusing to account for his own campaign-related finances.

It didn’t have to be this way. Neophyte politicians have succeed in the past. President Dwight D. Eisenhower won election in 1952 without elective experience.He succeeded where Trump and Greitens have failed largely because he respected America’s time-honored democratic institutions and worked within the system rather than pursuing a wrecking-ball approach.

Both Trump and Greitens are fighters who keep getting up, even when they’ve been delivered knockout punches. But the prospects of either leader surviving to the end of his term look increasingly grim.

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

In 1938, Orson Welles panicked the nation with a false alarm about a Martian invasion in the radio broadcast “The War of the Worlds.” That was far-fetched, of course. But what happened on Saturday, sadly, was not so hard to imagine. or believe.

Authorities sent an emergency alert to cellphones in Hawaii: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

The possibility that a missile or missiles would land hung in the air for 38 minutes. That’s 38 long minutes while people sought shelter and reached out to relatives. We imagine some wondered if they’d ever hear the voices of their loved ones again.

Thankfully, it was a false alarm.

In calmer times, such an alert might have been shrugged off by many people as a relic of the Cold War. Someone pushed the wrong button. No biggie.

Many Americans may believe this nation is 50 years past such dire alerts. When a cell phone blares with an alert, people brace for bad weather. A tornado. A thunderstorm. Not a nuclear attack.

But a new nuclear threat looms. This time, from a North Korean dictator trading threats and insults with President Donald Trump. What’s real? What’s political theater? What’s empty bluster for domestic audiences? We don’t know.

We do know that Hawaiians aren’t the only ones in range of a potential North Korea strike. Washington, D.C., is also likely in range, or soon will be. New York, too. And of course, Chicago.

In December, for the first time in more than three decades, a warning siren sounded across Hawaii as officials tested a system that could alert residents that a nuclear missile launched by North Korea was headed their way. Hawaiians now watch TV ads to prepare them for the worst.

Saturday’s false alarm may be quickly forgotten. But a terrible thought lingers: The next warning could be real.