So now he’s saying Biden died and got robotically cloned. Can we finally agree, dear Trump supporters, that the man has lost his marbles? No?
What are y’all giggling about?
Crazy balls
I suspect his fans understand, better than the rest of us do, that it’s all just a winking game. The old shyster just keeps lobbing the crazy balls over the net, and we keep being shocked & appalled, and everybody stays distracted while Project 2025 gets tucked quietly into place.
Let us resist normalizing this madness. Here in the thickening air of summer 2025, let’s do our best to cop a perspective on Little Donnie Two-Dolls and the mob who crowned him king.
Choppy waters
A few months in, Trump 2.0 is having to dig deeper into his bag of tricks. He can no longer stay afloat on the grandiose promises that buoyed him up
on the campaign trail.
The war in Ukraine didn’t end “in less than 24 hours.” Judges are rebuking him, Moody’s is downgrading him. Prices aren’t coming down and hard-hat jobs aren’t coming back.
Brother Elmo, that master of performative vandalism, has turned against him (everybody saw this Death Cult Civil War coming, but astrology nailed the timing. See my January blog, about the “political bar fight when Mars transits over their respective Mars degrees in May-June ’25.”)
Indeed, the Trumpster is careening “from fuckup to fuckup, like a dumber, fatter, oranger Wile E. Coyote” (Shower Cap Blog.) Feeling his political survival at risk, he’s been casting about for redder, bloodier meat to throw to his fans. What’s left to offer them?
Vindictiveness. That’s the ticket. He’ll crank up the revenge machine a notch.
The punishment show
It’s the last tool in his toolbox. He’ll punish his perceived enemies in ever-more-spectacular fashion. He’ll send them to a gulag, he’ll re-open Alcatraz. He’ll 
invent new, ever-more-farfetched grievances, like accusing South Africa of victimizing its white citizens.
He’ll make a show of censoring Harvard — that’ll show ’em, for rejecting his application back in the day – which will simultaneously gratify his anti-intellectual fans and assuage his own status envy. He’ll spew out all-caps tantrum posts trashing Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Oprah… even Bruce Springsteen, who he says looks like “a dried-up prune.”
Pretty bold to criticize someone else’s skin when your own complexion can best be described as tandoori catcher’s mitt. – Stephen Colbert
But, seriously: what’s with targeting the most beloved celebrities in America? Surely a fair share of Trumpers, too, are fans of Oprah, Springsteen and Sesame Street.
But perhaps that’s the point. Because these celebs are popular across the ideological spectrum, it makes them symbols of monoculture — the last remaining shreds of our societal cohesion. Maybe this is why they’re on our Sociopath-in-Chief’s enemies list.
Vice signaling
But it’s the traditional “enemies” — refugees, immigrants legal or not, and social justice workers — who are getting the strongest dose of Trump poison. The longer he fails to deliver any actual benefits to his devotees, the more sadistic his vice signaling becomes. Such as that stomach-turning video the White House showed to mark his first 100 days, featuring a shackled deportee, accompanied by a triumphant rock soundtrack.
All of his recent tyrannies— overturning birthright citizenship, suspending habeas corpus, purging dissenters and punishing jurists — — have been fashioned to make his base cheer at seeing others humiliated and debased.
Populism my ass
In order to understand why half the country can watch these stunts without revulsion, we need the language of psychology, not political theory. For a start, let’s stop calling this movement “populist.”
MAGA has nothing to do with class consciousness. If it did, after the Qatar bribe-mobile and the threats to Medicare and the “Big Beautiful Bill” that cuts benefits to workers to feed tax cuts for billionaires , the red hats would be storming the White House.
Dark Pluto
We need something like Jungian astrology to understand the roiling energies that operate underneath the surface of group consciousness. Such as the karmic lesson the USA is currently trying to absorb: the Pluto Return.
Like all planetary symbols, Pluto is value-neutral. It represents what happens when things decay, like global empires, in order to become something new and different.
When Pluto is shanghaied by ego, we get power in its ugliest form: dominance-submission spectacles, such as ICE Barbie Kristi Noem flaunting her power over half-naked detainees packed like animals into a jail cell.
Control and conquer
Trump 2.0 is the Mars-Pluto presidency, as Frederick Woodruff and I have discussed in our videocasts. The election and the inauguration took place when the two planets were exactly opposed.
When distorted, this combination devolves to control-&-conquer. Its psychological expression is the bully, and its political expression is fascism.
Hotlines for the 1%
Repression and fascism have existed in every age, of course. Pluto has always been somewhere. But our version of this dark energy is peculiar to our era. Naomi Klein calls it End-Times Fascism.
One of its features is the walls of separation being built between the uber-rich and the rest of us. Financial walls and actual walls. The grotesquely wealthy are protecting themselves behind armed bunkers.
Tyranno-nerd Marko Zuckerberg, when he’s not preaching about digitally uniting all the peoples of the world, is fortifying his underground compound in Hawaii). A.I. billionaire Sam Altman is preparing for civilizational collapse by stockpiling guns, gold and gas masks. Peter Thiel dreams of exiting the country and creating his own privatized techo-Zionist utopia.
Corporations are dreaming up gold-card security systems, like the hotline being planned for CEOs to report perceived threats, designed to protect the one-percenters who are quaking in their Guccis at the thought of future Luigi Mangionis.
Self-fortressing is trending internationally. The epitomical example is Israel, whose chosen approach to self-protection is ethnic cleansing. India is following this model in Kashmir.
The best defense
The sign Cancer (security) is a unifying theme in the natal charts of the USA, Trump and Musk. Low-level Cancer obsesses about safety for itself
and its tribe, while excluding or exiling strangers. And non-compliant relatives, like Musk’s trans kid.
This is the impulse at work in Trump’s tariffs, an attempt to withdraw from the rest of the world like a turtle pulling back into its shell. This is what’s behind his fantasy of a “Golden Dome” – like Israel’s Iron Dome, only sparklier — to protect us from all those missiles no one is sending.
Exaggerated by transiting Jupiter in Cancer for a year, and by the personal planets this summer, defense mechanisms are booming, especially in the USA. 
Thanks to the Saturn-Sun square in the national chart, aggressive blaming is Uncle Sam’s lingua franca.
It’s another form of self-protection, à la “The best defense is a good offense.”
Toxic empathy
Trump represents something deep in the American psyche which hates to take responsibility. His fans exult in this avoidance, going so far as to reach into their bibles to find justifications for his felonies and sexual assaults. The Democrats have their own denial strategies Consider the way they circled the wagons last year, trying to stonewall Biden’s cognitive decline.
Behind all defense mechanisms is a vision of separation. The psyche tries to widen the gulf between the self and others, between its group and other groups. In this cultural climate, old-fashioned charitability is in short supply.
A loutish new coinage says it all: “toxic empathy,” intended to mock and condemn other people’s humanitarian efforts. Unsurprisingly, the phrase is popular with folks who passionately decry the lack of empathy towards their own white male asses.
Selective empathy
But empathy is at a low ebb across the board, even among the most well-intentioned of citizens. It even seems to be true that — in a supreme irony of the human heart — the greater the number of sufferers in need of our empathy, the greater our denial.
Consider the deafening silence with which most Americans are meeting the pitiless slaughter in Palestine.
Granted, these days Americans of conscience have their attention focused elsewhere. That is, on the domestic emergency of surviving under a malevolent nutcase of a president who holds the balls of the other two branches of government in his tiny little fists.
But as students of the human psyche we might ponder the curious inconsistency going on here. Eight people were injured in the Colorado attack last week by someone yelling “Free Palestine.” He was immediately termed a “terrorist,” of course, by the American media. But
when entire Palestinian families are killed or when Palestinian children die of malnutrition, it’s just another day in Gaza.—Masha Gessen
This selective empathy is normal, as a protection against overwhelm. Who can fathom the horror of 52 thousand (so far) murdered in Gaza, ten thousand of them children? We fear that if we allow these facts to sink in, we will drown. So we acknowledge some of the wrongs of the world and ignore the others.
On a psychological level, it’s as understandable as any other defense mechanism. But on a spiritual level it is an abdication. When we ignore immense suffering on our watch, we neglect our Jupiters, our inborn moral compass.
And we fail to cultivate our Neptunes, the part of us that knows that an inhumanity against any one of us is an inhumanity against us all.
The Four Horsemen
Some of the denial tropes clogging up the mass psyche right now are shared by everyone alive. They are time-sensitive and era-specific. They are a function of living in the Anthropocene, an epoch characterized by apocalyptic dread.
The four horsemen of the apocalypse are not unique to our age. They have galloped through every era. In 13th-century Europe, for instance, they showed up as the Black Death. Now, they’re showing up as climate catastrophe, nuclear annihilation, and the specter of AI rendering humans obsolete.
Their thundering hooves reverberate throughout our entertainments: in all those dystopian movies about global takeovers by robots, zombies and evil aliens. These fictions use the titillation of pretend horror to mimic, and distract us from, the true horrors. Recreational fear seems to serve a cathartic function.
But collective nightmares follow the same psychological rules as personal ones. If we want to be optimally healthy, we must make them conscious. We can’t creatively respond to the dark horsemen unless we acknowledge them.
Our job is to recognize the thundering fears of our age, and go forth anyway.
Instinct
We acknowledge that somehow these horsemen are our horsemen. For its own mysterious reasons, our soul decided to incarnate here and now. At this point, instinct will guide us. We start listening to that part of us that knows, full well, the difference between what’s life-affirming and what isn’t.
This is the part of us that abhors Trump’s proposals to drill for oil in our wilderness areas, even the heretofore sacrosanct bottom of the sea. It’s the part of us that cringes when we hear about the already-rich getting richer still, by extracting critical minerals – with child labor, no less — in third-world countries. 
Call it instinct, call it animal intelligence, call it the wisdom at the center of our charts. It will attract us to activities that unite people, rather than separate them.
It’ll lead us to turn away from the lunatic denial mechanisms of our society: the winner-take-all politics, the exclusionary religious stances, the sophisticated campaign of “alternate facts” that tries to inoculate the public against the truth.
Sanity is natural
It’s quite natural, this desire to align with sense rather than nonsense. In our choice of media, we’ll be like plants turning towards the Sun, seeking out ideas that enhance sanity. And per the law of synchronicity, there’s a bumper crop of clear thinkers and bold visionaries arising under the Aries transits now firing up the sky.
Klein is one such thinker. She makes the point that that the most destructive reactionaries right now have one thing in common: they have turned their backs on our planet.
The techno-billionaires who envision colonizing outer space, or building A.I. worlds to live in, are brothers under the skin with the rural survivalists stockpiling weapons against a predicted flood of immigrants. Also in this club are the Christian Zionists, like Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee, who fantasize about a rapture that will leave this sinful mortal coil behind.
Each of these groups has given up on the Earth. In fact, they’re betting against the future, and fueling the fires that are burning it down. But though they hold worldly power, think of how many more of us there are.
So those of us who believe in this world – as broad a coalition as you can imagine – have to have the courage to counter that, with our belief in this realm and each other. – Naomi Klein
