It’s always personal with Trump. He dominates as Henry VIII did in England, or Caligula did in Rome. His trip to China wasn’t about US-China relations, it was about Trump-Xi relations.
Everybody knows that Trump’s behavior has nothing to do with statecraft or geopolitics.
That is, everybody except the traditional media. Straightjacketed by old-fashioned journalistic decorum, they persist in parsing his moves as if they were based on ideas and principles. After all, we won’t be seeing the Washington Post running a headline that says “The president is losing his marbles.”
…the news from the presidential cognition front remains rather grim… What-if-Genghis-Khan-Were-a-Game-Show-Host can no longer remember the names of even the countries he’s started wars with…–Shower Cap
Organic decay
But Trump’s outsized personality is just the tip of the spear.
The transpersonal approach to larger-than-life historical figures doesn’t consider their personal pathologies merely on their own terms. We see them as features that make the person typecast for the role they’ve been destined to play. If you’re an American meaning seeker trying to work out how current political abominations relate to you, this perspective can be useful.
As the USA-led world order breaks down (US Pluto Return), the least savory features of the American psyche are rising to the surface like noxious gases rising from a carcass.
Trump is a mirror of these: the shallow puerility (see Frederick Woodruff’s essay), the impulsivity, the anti-intellectuality, the entitlement.
Ego rising
Astrological analysis of Trump’s chart usually focuses on his Mars-in-Leo rising. His is a degraded version of this placement, which describes his distorted ego – which some say is way too big, and others, more perceptively, say is broken, resulting in a state of screamingly obvious overcompensation.
But our emphasis on this feature is in some ways misleading. Consider that Mars in Leo is hot. But at his core, Trump is cold.
Deathly cold.
“Not even a little bit”
More pernicious than his ego distortions is Trump’s utter indifference to anything except vanity projects like his golden ballroom, and to any other human being, except maybe his comely daughter Ivanka.
… I say, let the old fop build… his Barbie Dreamhouse. We’re clearly lurching towards a Norma Desmond-y climax here, and the moment demands an appropriate set. It all comes to a head during history’s least comfortable daddy-daughter dance. — Shower Cap
Towards members of his own party, he expresses arrogant apathy. Shrugging off the future of the GOP, he has said
“Who cares? I’ll be dead.”
As for the voters, he doesn’t hide his contempt. The other day, he admitted that he didn’t care “even a little bit” that Americans were suffering because of his disastrous war.
S&M follies
The chasm of emptiness inside this man is a cautionary tale for us all. It’s a personal pathology that also reflects a societal pathology, one that’s all the more dangerous for being so pervasive as to be unremarkable.
Goddess knows, Trump did not invent cynicism. It has forever and always been a dirty secret of political life. But he has normalized it.
Before now, it would’ve been unheard of for a politician to express unvarnished disdain for his devoted following (“I could run on UFOs. People really believe this shit”) or publicly insult those who serve him (“I like to be around losers”).
But Trump seems to revel in these shows of derision. He takes glee in running his cabinet like an S&M game, as Woodruff (ibid) has chronicled. Remember the oversized 
shoes he forced upon his lackeys?
Watching pathetic buffoons like Hegseth and Patel be-clown themselves is bad enough. But worse is the self-degradation of his coldly ambitious heirs apparent, Vance and Rubio. Soulless but not brainless, they express a deeper circle of cynicism hell, prostrating themselves before a boss they know full well is an idiot.
Saddest of all, they know that we know that they know it.
Poster boys
The new cynicism has plenty of poster boys. There are the amoral tech lords, and the media moguls who sell out free speech for their bottom line. There are the Washington insiders who laugh at Trump behind his back, but stay mum in order to keep their fat insider trades and martini lunches in the Beltway club.
As for high-profile hypocrisy, consider the Republican congressmen during King Charles’s recent visit.
It was like the last scene of Lord of the Flies, when the grownup arrived and the feral little monsters got civil again.– Mallon Baker
It was stomach-turning to see those senators stand and applaud as the king praised our system of checks and balances, these guys who piss on the principles of American democracy with their every vote.
Winking shrug
Trump’s campaign of cynicism began years ago, with his baiting-the-libs game. He’d throw out provocative statements like “Maybe we shouldn’t have elections”, in a ditzy, offhand manner (low-level Gemini). Then he’d watch, with lizard cunning, as the sane world was thrown into a tizzy. Was he joking? Did he really mean it?
His taunting game was taken up by the 4Chan mob, who emerged from the fetid shadows of the internet and went mainstream.
At this point, the Pepe-the-Frogsters have metastacized into the manosphere, where they flaunt their Hitler memes and incel misogyny without restraint. They’ve become slop influencers, making a living harnessing transgression to drive clicks, sow chaos, and gain notoriety.
Moral carelessness
A first responder to the call of this ugly cultural moment was Nick Fuentes, who famously told his followers to “rape, kill, and die for Nicholas J. Fuentes.” Did he really mean this? Or, like Trump, was he just chasing eyeballs? Does it matter? He would say No, it does not. Because nothing matters.
There’s a popular A.I. edit that shows Charlie Kirk, in a Captain America cape, confronting Jeffrey Epstein. Both of these public figures
…obviously occupy charged spaces in the current cultural imagination, and by caricaturizing them in a brain-rot edit, they are transformed into absurdist avatars whose complexities are flattened into a winking shrug: Isn’t it weird how much everyone cares about these guys? Brady Brickner-Wood
The giddy meaninglessness of meme-a-minute slop seemed to come full circle recently, when the news broke that many of these shitposters are not red-blooded MAGAs at all. They are poor schmucks living in Malaysia or Bangladesh, hoping to cash in on the gravy train of vitriol.
Idea-free zone
President Taco’s chronic lying has had the effect of immunizing us against the expectation of consistency. Now, when other public figures follow his lead and switch positions like a weathervane in the wind, we hardly notice.
If nothing is real to you, it’s not going to be a big jump to move from one inauthentic stance to another, as, for example, Russell Brand has: from radical political shit-stirrer to Jesus freak.— Vlad Vexler
Interestingly, though, Brand seems at least to be trying to look like a believer. By contrast, most of the digital nihilists seem altogether uninterested in ideas.
Winning the interaction
In this way, the new cynics are unlike the Dadaists and surrealists whose movement they superficially resemble.
Consider the trend whore Clavicular, who exemplifies the self-avowedly non-ideological end of the spectrum. Paradoxically, his purview is the Venus principle (relationships, beauty). But he has taken the heart out of it.
His worldview, like his prettiness, is proudly blank. Its premise seems to be that dating and relationships are a con: everything is fake anyway, so why not game an already rigged system. This resonates with many in a generation of confused young men trying to make sense of, and detach from, the brutal realities of contemporary life (op cit, Brickner-Wood).
Everything goes black
Trump’s cynicism reached a new nadir recently, when he entered into sacrilege territory. He grabbed hold of the two most hotly charged ideas in American thought — patriotism and Christianity – and emptied them of meaning. His glib blasphemies exhibit the same spirit of scammery that he uses to peddle his steaks, coins and phones.
But the old boy is clearly feeling the approach of The Great Threshold. We now find him obsessing about legacy monuments and wondering about his chances of getting into heaven. These must be as close to spiritual musings as a guy gets, who’s made a career of negating meaningfulness.
It seems likely that, in lieu of a real belief system, Trump harbors a childlike nihilism: cynicism’s end game. Sort of like a little kid who thinks that, at death, everything goes black, or something.
This aligns with what psychologists tell us about people with narcissistic personality disorder. They assume the world will cease to exist after they die.
Warning
In this, Donald Trump, our monstrously inverted role model, serves as a warning. He’s showing us a potential threat to our own psycho-spiritual health.
We too flirt with the poison of cynicism when, for example, we say “Thank god the war is happening in the Middle East, and not where I live.” Or when we boomers say “Climate catastrophe is going to be horrible but at least it’ll be after I’m gone.” Or “AI is going to ruin everything, but at my age, I’ll miss the worst of it.”
Traumatic times
These are traumatic times, and we must admit that they are. Our work is to stay open anyway.
It is a sign of aliveness to experience rage, even waves of despair at time, when we hear about the bombed girls’ school, the ICE murders, the gutting of the voting rights act, the staggering grift, and on and on.
We must allow ourselves to feel all the feelings, even the painful ones, then flush them out and continue on.
But at our peril do we indulge cynicism. That’s the dead zone.
