Whether he wins or loses, we’re not off the hook.

First of all, Election Day won’t be just a day long, thanks to the GOP’s blood-curdlingly cynical campaign against non-existent “voter fraud,” their attacks on the post office and polling stations, and Trump’s Oh-yeah?-Make-me! approach to leaving the White House if he loses.

These stunts are no more or less than the perilous logical extension, as Jelani Cobb says, of all that his tenure has been about. They’re outrageous and deserve our outrage.

But that doesn’t get us off the hook, because it’s about so much more than Trump.

Deepening the swamp

There’s no question that the Orange One and his cohort subjected the country over four years’ time to an escalating series of insults, each enabling greater violations of norms, ethics, and laws. But this ridiculous man did not make Washington DC a swamp of mendacity. He just arrived there, recognized the smell, and dove in.

We can imagine him pulling up to the White House for the first time, striding awkwardly through the grand front doors with a mixture of glee, bafflement and terror. Still in shock that his elaborate branding exercise landed him in the corridors of power, his evil little brain nonetheless set to work, thinking up ways to leverage it.

Once ensconced, he became the plutocrats’ good servant: gutting environmental regulations, handing out tax cuts, abortion restrictions and regressive judges.

This is all common knowledge. In fact, it’s the stuff of tragic myth.

Now it’s time to pump our energy into something besides our anti-infatuation with Donald Trump.

Hinge point

During a national trauma like this one, perspective is precious and crucial. So how do we get it? Not by being sucked into the election-as-horserace hoopla.

If we’re after perspective, the good-guys-vs.-bad-guys plot line is less than insufficient.

It’s a red herring.

Trump the Man

How do we get at the meaning of this group moment?

Many critics begin and end with the toxicity of Trump’s character. In this sense, he represents the country’s sins writ large: a guy whose stunted personal development mirrors that of the USA, a young-soul country that got too big for its britches (Jupiter/Sun) and needs a head-to-toe makeover.

Take Trump’s personal finances: his wealth-inflating posturing, his long, drawn-out tax-return hiding. This faux-billionaire president is the perfect mirror for the plutocratic sins of the country as a whole (Venus/Jupiter/ Sun) — now showing up, per karmic law, as a pending economic meltdown. ⁽¹⁾

There’s a geopolitical parallel, too, between this individual and this collective entity. His racism and bullying towards the rest of the world (“shit-hole countries”) reflect America’s own history of militaristic imperialism. We can chalk up to group karma the fact that Uncle Sam’s current substitute for foreign policy is an ignorant crank tweeting from his bathroom at 2 am.

From the Trump-the-Man point of view, we see a walking disease vector who has infected everything around him. Like a poison broth on a slow simmer, his administration has been reduced to lackeys soulless enough to have won — temporarily — his hollow trust. Anyone with a molecule of integrity has gotten boiled off, leaving the concentrated dregs of the political class — the Stephen Millers and Kimberly Guilfoyles — as the only ones left to draw a paycheck and to catch his literal and figurative sickness.

Naked emperor 

But there are no surprises here.

We have been witnessing this horror show for four years. (Longer, if you live in New York, whose denizens have been rolling their eyes at him for decades. Spy Magazine, reporting on his real estate failures and gilt bedrooms, called him a “short-fingered vulgarian” back in the 1980s).

How much more can we learn from this Johnny-One-Note nightmare? Not nearly as much as we can learn by taking an honest look at the country that created such a man.

Consider the politicos and pundits who normalized a flagrantly crazy situation, by framing it as if it weren’t. The opinion-makers who talked about this vicious fool in terms of liberal-vs-conservative. The talking heads who legitimized his capricious ravings as if they deserved to be part of — what’s the euphemism? — a frank exchange of views.

Thus did the country gaslight itself into Psycho Town.

Certainly there were those who shouted out, as the little boy did in the story, that the emperor had no clothes. But that fact was ludicrously self-evident from the very beginning, and shouting only made us hoarse.

False populist

When scholars look back at this chapter of American history, they will spend far less time on Trump than is imaginable to us now. They, unlike we, will be outside of the Trump bubble, and it will be obvious that there’s not much to analyze.

[Trump] just acts out, without any mental inner workings, aside from narcissist necessity.  – Adam Gopnik

The Donald is a simple creature. The evidence suggests he cannot change, therefore he cannot surprise. He never purported to be anything other than the damaged parody of American testosterone that he is.

Worthier of our interest is the psychology of his fan base: the 40% of the population who still see him as a warrior king (Prof. B. S. Flowers has pointed out that what drives Trump’s followers is not so much a political myth as a religious one).

Rather than trying to plumb a man with no depth, we might more profitably plumb the great, sordid irony that underlies the MAGA phenomenon: that an undisguised huckster has exacted an unshakable loyalty from the supposedly non-gullible Real Folks, the tell-it-like-it-is patriots, the Show-Me State voters.

This is the riddle that will not go away with Trump: how heroism came to be projected upon a spoiled rich kid by the hardworking poor. How false populism came to be exalted while true populism — Bernie Sanders et al — was spurned.

As Adam Gopnik puts it:

… ethnic resentment and clan consciousness are social forces far more powerful than economic class. It reflects the permanent truth that all people, including poor people, follow their values, however perverted, rather than their interests, however plain.

Astrologers link angry populism to the asteroid Eris, strong in the skies for the past few years. Her reactive rage is not confined to American Trumpsters.

In the U.K., Fintan O’Toole describes a similar mindset among disgruntled Brexiteers, who thrill to Boris Johnson’s tirades against the snobs and ruling classes — of which Johnson is, famously and indisputably, a card-carrying member.

In their grievances O’Toole hears a “pleasurable self-pity in which one can feel at once horribly hard done by and exceptionally grand.”

Duopoly

But an analysis of the opposing camp will get us only so far.

If we want to understand what’s happening to the USA we have to go deeper than condemning the flagrantly craven plutocrats while plumping for the kinder, gentler plutocrats.

The Democratic establishment, demonized (literally, in QAnon’s extravagant fantasies) by the crackpot rightwing, is also despised by the progressives as never before, thanks to the DNC’s betrayal of the Sanders camp and its promise of real change.

Centrist liberals, singling out Trump as obsessively as his supporters do, are caught up in the same binary trap. Their version is: Evil dictator Trump vs. Back-to-Obama Biden. 

But once Trump is over, it will be harder to avoid Uncle Sam’s dirty secret, hidden in plain sight: that the American system is not a democracy but a plutocracy, maintained by a party system that’s a self-perpetuating duopoly (David Graeber lays it all out in three minutes), now crumbling from the inside out.

Sins writ large

In the astrological view, Trump is a symptom of this crumbling.

Years ago, when astrologers looked ahead to 2020 and saw that staggering line-up of planets, we expected crises both economic and political; what was less foreseeable was the epidemiological piece. But they are all coming together in the Plutonian unraveling.

What we are witnessing in the American response to the [Covid] crisis, more than the flame-out of Trump, is the gulf between the competence of the American government machine in managing global finance and the Punch and Judy show of its politics. …[The pandemic] has forced an apparent choice between economic performance and mass death…. – Adam Tooze

Also complicit in the crumbling is the conventional media, whose “…acquiescence, confusion and exhaustion” made Trump possible. The American telecommunications industry has always been willing and able to undermine democracy. This jumps out at us from the national chart.

The transits of the late 20-teens tell us that there was always going to be some kind of mass break with reality (Neptune T-squaring the US Mars-Neptune square) during the very years that Uncle Sam’s hyper-power status reached its expiration date (Pluto Return).⁽²⁾

The singular evil

The USA’s proud Capricorn institutions were fated to disintegrate right about now, no matter who was in charge. But Trump seems to have been typecast by the Cosmic Casting Agency to personify the decline.

As a symbol of disunion, “he has sown conflict where none existed and exacerbated it where it did” (J. Cobb). And as a caricature of fecklessness, who better to oversee the global loss of respect that the USA has suffered over the past few years?

But sooner or later Trump will fizzle out like a cheap firecracker, and — unless we change it, from the bottom up — we’re still going to be stuck with a corporate plutocracy. We’re still going to have to decide whether we want to live in a national security state more extreme than Edward Snowden’s worst nightmare.

We’re still going to decide whether we want our taxes — the ones we pay, but slime-bags like Trump don’t pay– to subsidize military drones that kill distant strangers (presumed not to exist because the conventional media doesn’t mention them any more) as part of a last-gasp campaign to preserve the hegemony of “American interests” all over the world.

Post-Trump world

Let’s start envisioning what we want out of a post-Trump world. Instead of hanging on the news anchors’ reactions to each nonsensical tweet, let’s listen to ideas that could actually lead us through the stringent times ahead. From people like Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges, who talk about what’s really happening.

And from Glen Greenwald, who argues that if any good has come from this despicable man, it’s because

…he has made people understand that this model of the American presidency – this omnipotence, this lack of checks and balances — is so dangerous. But the problem is they’re being told that the danger is endemic to Trump, and not to this broader systemic abuse that’s been created.

Once he’s gone, people of conscience will have to grapple with the fact that this abuse has not gone away. Then, maybe we’ll be able to turn our attention to the rot beneath the floorboards.

But who says we have to wait? We can start, at any time, making the most of having been born into a remarkable historical moment.  

Notes

(1) The idea that the economy is doing surprisingly well — a notion shared by establishment politicos of both parties and parroted by the conventional media — stems from the strange presumption that the stock market is a realistic indicator of economic health. But by any other measure, it is obvious that although Wall Street is doing fine, the public is not. Real wages are stagnant, millions of people have no insurance, no work, no way out of debt. The pandemic is making this clearer every day (see Robert Shiller).

(2) For ongoing transits and progressions to the charts of key political players, see Nancy Somers’ excellent starlight news.

Trump cartoon by Sack, Star Tribune

Angel painting by Thomas Alen Kopera