Uncle Sam is traumatized.
Even those on the winning side, although they may feel giddy with victory, are on dangerous psychological ground. Let’s take a deep breath and cop some astrological perspective.
Astrology is helpful, first and foremost, because it’s a reminder that everything changes. Transits keep transiting; everything is a phase. This is something we know intellectually but forget emotionally, when in crisis.
Secondly, the big transits — the ones that track centuries rather than years — give us the long view. They tell us which way the wind is blowing, world consciousness-wise.
Zombie battle
I’m pretty sure future astrologers are going to remember this election season as the last gasp of the country’s Pluto Return: the final nail in the coffin of a 250-year-long era, during which the country played out its classic Capricorn power trips. These past couple of years have been the transit’s last hurrah.
For a decade and a half, the planet of breakdown has been hovering around its natal placement in the USA chart. It’s been focusing a laser beam on our version of worldly power:
that of wealthy (2nd house) white men on top and everybody else on various lower rungs lower down.
It’s the way the USA has defined political power since it was born, in the 18th century, when the electoral college and “a well-regulated militia” made any kind of sense.
Since then, this construction of power has devolved to the point of putrefaction, exemplified by the grotesque idea that corporations should have more rights than human beings.
Donald is what is vomited up out of decay. He’s a symptom of our diseased society, not its cause. — Chris Hedges
Pluto is entering Aquarius now, and the new era will raise new problems. They’ll be extreme — because: Pluto — but they’ll be different. A.I. and climate meltdown will be hitting their stride in the next 20 years, and human populations will react, and respond, to match.
But we aren’t there yet. We’re still assimilating the death throes of the old era, with its clunky old artifacts flailing around like zombies, driven mad by the knowledge that they’re no longer vital.
Now’s the time to look at the country’s dying institutions with dispassionate clarity. We have learned that the conventional ways of politicking (Capricorn) don’t apply any more. The polls are unable to make accurate predictions, people vote against their own interests, and the establishment media, struggling to uphold an expiring fourth estate, is at a loss to tell us what it all means.
How did it happen?
Astrologers will remember what happened in November 2024 as the Mars-Pluto election: Rage (Mars) in the face of wrenching, bone-deep change (Pluto).
The uncanny correlations between Trump’s chart and that of the USA put a spotlight on the media. Pluto opposes Mercury in the country’s chart (propaganda, mind control), and Trump’s Venus-Saturn conjuncts it to the degree. His superpower has been his ability to play the media, and the rightwing media knows how to play him.
Or rather, it has been his savvy partner. (For example, Fox routinely edited its coverage of his campaign performances, downplaying the bits where he was barely intelligible.) We have reached the logical extension of this toxic marriage now, with the network’s talk show hosts being installed into his cabinet.
The union of Fox and faux-populism began with the evil genius of Roger Ailes. It may be hard to remember, but until Ailes came along, the rabid right-wing had no voice in the media. Ailes, the canny old fox, 
recognized that a sizable chunk of the country wanted to stay in 1965 forever. He made a business of the left-behinds, the millions of Americans who previously had no commercial use. He monetized them and gave them a political home.
Election coverage is a multi-billion-dollar industry. And it is also entertainment, keeping everybody, Trump lovers and Trump loathers alike, glued to the news. This campaign season felt like a cross between a gladiatorial blood fest and a Marvel movie, complete with NFTs for sale featuring Trump as the caped crusader.
Even when, towards the end, the Orange One reeled off-script “like a blender going at full speed with the top off “(Maureen Dowd), it only seemed to boost the ratings further.
What’s the matter with the Democrats?
Conventional wisdom says the Democrats lost because they spent all their energy on tangential cultural progressivism instead of genuine progressivism. In a country where more than half the population lives paycheck to paycheck, the argument goes, would it not have made sense to appeal to the fact that a tiny few have been getting obscenely rich while everybody else is getting poorer?
It is hardly a secret that a gaping pit of financial insecurity exists in this wealthy country, and that it is linked to drug overdoses, suicide, domestic violence and despair. But the Democrats, traditionally the party of non-wealthy people, did not make income disparity their central rallying point. This, despite the fact that Trump’s fans tend to be the very people whose lives are most under threat by economic injustice and the collapse of the social contract.
Why didn’t the Harris campaign take on the elephant in the room?
Alas, the Democratic Party is, as their enemies insist, indeed part of the establishment. They may be the kinder-gentler plutocrats, but the same fat cats fund both parties. Neither half of this duopoly wants to change the country’s oligarchic structure.
Class consciousness is not the American public’s strong suit, so the powers-that-be have been given free rein to craft the narrative. And it’s the only narrative most people ever hear: that of our being in a red-vs-blue civil war, rather than a top-vs-bottom one.
This keeps the public happily outraged, rooting for their chosen side and condemning the other, fixated on trans bathroom-crashing rather than on taxing billionaires or ending wars.
When it comes to making the world more dangerous, Trump and [the Democrats] have pursued converging and in some cases identical policies – a point of unity that neither side ever acknowledges. — Aaron Mate
What’s the matter with the poor?
Impoverished and undereducated voters (half of American adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level) have been stewing with rage for a long time. I’ve been thinking of that image from A Christmas Carol, where the ghost opened his cloak to reveal two ragged children:
“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both… but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom…” — Charles Dickens
Neglected by both parties – the disdainful phrase “flyover states” says it all – this demographic, the one favored by the electoral college system, has become a vast sea of 
fuel just waiting for a spark. And DJT dropped a match into it. All he had to do was identify the Democrats as being the elites. Once this label stuck, all that rage found its focus.
It didn’t matter to his fans that he himself was a nepo-baby, who, despite his cos-play, no one could imagine behind the wheel of a garbage truck or working at McDonalds. It didn’t matter that he flaunted a best-buddyship with the richest man in the world.
It didn’t matter that he flip-flopped on everything from gun control to abortion, or that he sold bibles made in China, or that his dancing was stupendously lame.
What mattered was that he gave his base a nice, clear target. Hating Democrats became their cultural identity. Like religious dogma, it ceased to be questioned. It was simply repeated as litany: It’s the Democrats who insult your dignity, who go to college and raise the price of eggs and don’t believe in Jesus.
Most Trump supporters [don’t] actually want to live in a world where an elderly sociopath has unfettered power. But they do want to live in a world where those currently in power are cowed and cautious rather than smug. … Michael Wolff
What mattered is that Trump, unlike any other apparatchik put forth by the overclass as a presidential candidate, acknowledged the public’s sense that the country is broken.
Blame
Among the many connections between Trump’s chart and that of the USA, there’s one that showcases America’s Saturn, the planet of blame. His crusade (Jupiter) of grievance feeds into the national hunger to point the finger outside the self.
Blame — a quick-&-dirty attempt to escape responsibility — is a poor use of a noble planet. But because of its square to the Sun in the national chart, it’s a pitfall to which Uncle Sam is peculiarly susceptible. MAGA Nation’s reasoning seems to be:
“Other people are causing our problems and we can solve this by hurting other people.”– Benjamin Applebaum
Gaslighting
As for the Other Side of the corporate media (I won’t call it “liberal,” a word that doesn’t mean anything anymore), it has never known what to do with Trump. Using the tropes of old-school journalism, it normalized his preposterousness, by putting lies and facts on an even footing. As the conventional news struggled and strained to maintain a
false evenhandedness, it only served to deepen our collective psychosis.
At a loss as to how to handle the avalanche of lies from Trump, the straight media just sort of gave up. There was a moment during the VP debate when the moderator, with a straight face, asked Walz about what Trump said Walz had said: that abortion in the ninth month was absolutely fine. Of course, she knew he had not said that. And everybody knew she knew.
It was a kind of gaslighting. Media conventions dictated that Trump be treated as a normal politician with political ideas & policies. This made sane people feel crazy. We were supposed to ignore the fact that the debate was putting an intelligent, articulate candidate on the same level as a shambling verbal mess. Harris was grilled about actual policies, while Trump, who seemed to have entered “kamikaze fuck-it mode” (Frederick Woodruff), was allowed to fill his time with malignant rambling.
Meanwhile, his devotees were descending deeper into their own madness. They were certain that
…this visibly decomposing con man is some sort of business genius who could fix all of the country’s problems, even if he had the slightest interest in doing so, which he doesn’t. — ShowerCap blog
The media’s efforts to present him as a policy maven, capable of engaging in legitimate policy disputes, is a category error. Much of the anti-Trump public is mired in the same confusion. Those Democrats who’d been waiting for his racism and sex crimes and felony convictions and miming fellatio on a microphone to tank him in the polls were missing the point.
Post-November 5th, the point has been indisputably made. He appeals to his devotees not despite his flouting of normal standards of decency, but because of it. Those young men now flaunting the misogynist victory slogan “Your body, my choice” love him for saying what they think, and what they think all politicians think but never say aloud.
One argument Trump’s supporters make is: You don’t get Trump’s honesty without his outrageousness. You don’t get a leader who can break the mold by supporting a person who conforms to the mold. … The man cannot stop himself; he cannot control himself. — Ezra Klein
He is a chaos agent (distorted Uranus-Sun conjunction), not a politician. His idea of humor is the illiterate insult (to the British sensibility, this is the grossest sin). His idea of government is the mafia model, which he’s making real, at this writing, by staffing the White House with loyal lieutenants.
Cartoon villain
But it will soon be clearer than ever that he does not have the brains or the discipline to be a good mob boss, nor the administrative skills of a dictator. He will be remembered more as a cartoon villain.
In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them. (“They’ll never laugh at me again!”) — Adam Gopnik
Reality checks
Astrology tells us that these years were always going to feature impassioned debates about “the end of democracy.” From this perspective, Trump is not a human figure but a mythic one. He is a messenger of the god of destruction/renewal, the star of a mortal drama with which the American group soul was fated to reckon.
The most unsettling aspect of this drama is that there is no longer a consensus standard in the public conversation. It’s as if the country has lost its common language. This has provoked a kind of existential drift, symbolized in astrology by the cycle of Saturn (reality) and Neptune (illusion).
These two planets squared each other in 2015, when the concept of “fake news” reared its head. They will conjoin this Spring.
The long view
What now? If the old institutions are crumbling (Pluto) and the reality-testing mechanisms are no longer reliable (Neptune), what are we left with?
We are left with the long view.
This election wasn’t the end of the country. Realistically, things don’t ever end. Phases have endings, but the processes of which they are a part don’t stop moving. The idea of endings is a human conceit. Americans will vote again in 2026, when the Senate map will probably favor Democrats. And again in 2028, when Trump will be ineligible to run for re-election, and/or dead.
The evolutionary momentum of society is stronger than this man and his regressive movement. Even if Trump were to appoint himself Savior-Daddy-for-Life, it wouldn’t stop this trajectory. Workers who’ve seen the possibility of an increase in the minimum wage are not going to tolerate a decrease. Women are not going to go back to being barefoot and pregnant. Christian nationalism may be having a resurge, but, historically speaking, the church is on its last legs. The nonwhite peoples of the world, their numbers ascendant, are not going to go back to slavery.
This is not to dismiss the terrible suffering that comes from deeply unconscious people holding worldly power. But these same conditions call upon us to deepen our connection, as individuals and in groups, to a different kind of power, a kind that can’t be taken away.
But what should I do?
The Pluto Return has been doing a splendid job.
It was supposed to take us back to the beginning of the great American Experiment, 250 years ago, by kicking the group soul into remembering what it was like when democracy was a new, wild and crazy idea. Our job is to seek out and hold onto the golden essence of that idea, and to let go of what’s gone rotten.
The US population is not used to intense struggle. It sees social breakdown as something that happens in foreign lands. But our complacency has been shaken now, and we’re going to have to exert ourselves.
The healthiest way to navigate the years upcoming is to find our place in them as if our soul had chosen it. As an astrologer, of course, I believe we did. An astrologer’s answer to the question on everyone’s minds — “But what do I do?” — is to look into our charts. We might find it is not about “doing” at all; that’s just Mars. All the planets together, in unique combination, describe the optimal way each of us could respond.
Some of us, when we have passed through the requisite stages of grief, may find that these are the times we were born for. We will start to see this historical moment as part of our soul plan, and we will pour into it everything we’ve got.
