“Joy is great, isn’t it?” Those were the first words of the first blog I wrote for MotherSky, back in November of 2008. Obama had just won, and people like me were dancing in the streets.
Now Mamdani has won in New York. Another charismatic outlier, setting another record for racial firsts, young, smart and with “the charm of the well-loved child” (astrologer Frederick Woodruff and I look discuss him in our podcasts.)
While our faux-populist president toasts his guests at a gilded Gatsby party, thereafter to relieve themselves in a marble bathroom (don’t blame me for this image, he’s the one who keeps regaling us with pictures of it), let us raise our own humble cups in celebration of a genuine populist, Brother Zohran.
But let us be clear-eyed about what’s happening. Remember the changes we’ve seen since that election night in 2008. American politics are a fluctuating sea. And at this point the waters have never been choppier.
The red and the blue
First off, let us beware of the red-vs-blue narrative so beloved of the conventional media. Like boxing promoters, the news moguls know that big, bloody contests between revved-up opponents are their best bet to hold viewer interest. They and their bosses in Washington, and their bosses on Wall Street, are invested in keeping the public firmly riveted upon a stripped-down two-ruling-party drama.
And let’s not kid ourselves about the Democratic establishment. We know it’s a self-protective power structure with a neoliberal agenda, separated from real people’s needs by inside-the-Beltway insularity. Mamdani won in spite of, not because of these guys.
The Democratic Party and its liberal allies…, fearing they too will be swept aside. .., cling to a dead political formula, clinging to the vain hope that being against Trump fills the void left by their lack of a vision and abject subservience to the billionaire class. – Chris Hedges
As for the other two big winners on Tuesday, Spanberger and Slotkin, they’re both ex-CIA. Forgive me if I sit out the blue flag-waving for these gals.
Brothers under the skin
Since Ronald Reagan, the differences between America’s two major parties have been getting slimmer and slimmer. These gents drink at the same country clubs, take money from the same fossil fuel lobbyists, and pledge to the same omertà about the $1 trillion war industry.
Americans across the political spectrum realize this. Over the past couple of years, the poor old Dems have dipped into sub-zero popularity
. As for the GOP, it’s been ripped to ribbons by MAGA.
And MAGA itself is no longer a monolith. Once solid as a rock, Trump’s base suffers new ruptures daily: over Epstein, over Fuentes/ Carlson, over Marjorie Taylor Green going rogue.
It’s time for us to take a step back, and consider the whole end-of-empire drama of which this meltdown is a part.
Pluto time
It’s all about America’s rocky transition from hyper-power to something else.
The astrology of this period has always been pretty clear about this. The world was fated to experience a paroxysm of distrust in traditional institutions during the Pluto in Capricorn years (2008-24), and the American system, in particular, was destined for a breakdown (Pluto Return).
In a dying plutocracy, extreme lunatics arise, backed by extreme wealth. — Corey Doctorow
The USA’s chart features a Pluto-Mercury (media, propaganda) opposition, which has been waiting, for 250 years, for its fated appointment with the Information Age. Uncle Sam’s identity crisis has coincided with an ecosphere buzzing with disconnected voices trumpeting disconnected realities.
As online conspiracists and unhinged extremists
started to dominate public discourse, the US Pluto Return came to a peak. The empire was ready for demolition. All it needed was a human wrecking ball to do the job.
Cue the orange con man from Queens.
Tower of Babel
Trump’s Sun-Uranus conjunction in Gemini fit right into this Tower of Babel. He may not understand computers, but he embodies the craziness of the digital era. As the national conversation has grown more dysfunctional, Trumpism has fed on the trauma.
I don’t mean trauma in a hyperbolic sense. Astrologically speaking, every outer-planet ingress, such as the ones happening now — Pluto (radical change) entering Aquarius (technology), Uranus (revolution) into Gemini (information) — is a trauma to the human condition.
That doesn’t mean we won’t survive it; the human mechanism is nothing if not resilient. But the Digital Revolution has hit the species hard, and it would help us to understand just how hard.
We are now in the third decade of the first digital century, a revolution is irreversible and of unknowable duration …[S]uch accelerated transitions are turbulent, stressful and usually violent. Information crises …change the way humanity organizes and views itself. Hierarchies tumble. Social norms are recoded. Morality is redefined. New philosophies are hatched. Gods are discarded. — Rafael Behr
Mythic monster
So the US electorate voted in this preposterous man. Like Victor Frankenstein with his monster, we created Trump. But unlike Jacob Elordi, our guy’s not handsome and winsome. He’s chaotic and dangerous, because the times are chaotic and dangerous.
Certain public figures seem fated to become mythic. Trump’s reptile brain grasped this from the beginning. To launch his reign, he chose a golden escalator, a modern chariot for a conquering god.
He may not have understood the particulars, such as how globalization, the wreckage of industrialization and off-the-charts income inequality had destabilized American society. But he saw the natives were restless. His animal instincts smelled the polarization in the air, and he knew that all that simmering aggression had to go somewhere.
His perverse genius was to weaponize all that socio-economic discontent by deflecting it, by calling it something else. He siphoned it into blame,
and rose on the fetid steam of race-baiting and elites-bashing. Murdoch’s media enterprise supported his rise and became the voice of his regime, undermining consensually held values such as fact-based journalism and established science.
Fox was “Fair and Balanced” in the same way that Donnie was gonna “drain the swamp.” The age of OppositeSpeak had begun.
Brotocrats
The tech lads, meanwhile, had grown older, richer and more amoral. They tweaked their dark arts to the point of staggering profitability (for them, not us). They figured out that the key to keeping us online was emotions. The primitive emotions, like anger, worked best (again, for them, not us.)
It was Steve Bannon, that wily old dog, who saw how to exploit this politically, by “flooding the zone with shit.” A Machiavelli for the digital age, Bannon advised his prince accordingly.
The plan was to incapacitate Trump’s critics in an avalanche of his crimes and atrocities. Responding properly to any one of them would be like trying to isolate a snowflake in a blizzard.
Category error
Another thing Bannon knows, which the general public seems still not to realize, is that Trump is not a politician.
This confusion is thanks to the straight media, who talk about Trump’s insults to law and custom as if they were — albeit “controversial” (loathsome euphemism) — driven by policy. This normalizes acts that would otherwise be seen as insane.
News anchors are gaslighting us when they discuss, with a straight face, whether this man should get a Nobel Peace prize — this man who vanity-bombed Iran, shredded arms control treaties and threatens military intervention in Nigeria, Venezuela and Canada (for hurting his feelings). They betray their responsibilities as journalists when they ask him softball questions about running for a third term – which every schoolchild knows is unconstitutional.
The pretense here is that Trump’s motivation is anything fancier than because he feels like it.
His disastrous tariffs, for example, were presented as arising from some kind of strategy. But for that to be true, Trump would have had to consider how it would play politically, which he didn’t. And he’d have had to understand at least the bare fundamentals of how tariffs work, which he doesn’t. This is the guy who, in his recent negotiation with Xi of China, traded
cutting-edge semiconductor chips in exchange for a smaller soybean purchase than before the senseless trade shenanigans started. It’s all right there in Chapter 9 of The Art of the Deal: Digging Yourself a Hold So You Can Buy a Ladder to Climb Out. – Shower Cap
Complicit media
Trump has found — probably to his own amazement — that if he repeats a lie often enough, it will be accepted by lots of people.
The media are complicit in this scam, by repeating his lies as fast as he dishes them out. Perhaps we can forgive our good anchorfolk for not knowing what to do with a president who flits from crisis to crisis, announcing each failure as a win and convincing an astonishing number of Americans to believe him.
Whereas the rest of us see quite clearly that he’s attacking Venezuelan fishing boats not because he really thinks they’re narco-terrorists, but because they juice him up with tough-guy energy and distract the public from Epstein.
We see that this isn’t about governing, nor is it about the country. It’s about Trump, who, like Melania’s infamous coat, really doesn’t care.
Psychology
Psychology gives us far more insight into Trump than politics does. Donnie’s personal pathologies, together with his cognitive decline, make him the perfect projection of America’s psychotic break.
He’s always been insane, if insanity means the inability to understand, appreciate and perceive reality. – Michael Wolf
Sociopaths throughout history — like Hitler, for whom Erich Fromm devised the diagnosis malignant narcissism, also widely attributed to Trump – have unique weirdnesses that make them typecast for the roles they play. In this case, we have a figurehead with a victim complex, a peculiar lack of an inner life, an inability to focus, and a bottomless need for attention.
Shrinks stay mum
Here’s where the expertise of American mental health professionals could come in handy. But alas, to the shameful list of cowardly institutions – universities, media organizations, tech companies – who have wimped out in the face of this crisis, we must add the American Psychiatry Association.
This group of worthies have been justifying their “No Comment” stance with the canard about it being a no-no to diagnose a public figure’s mental state, unless you’re their official therapist.
This ass-covering rule dates from the 1960s when Barry Goldwater sued a magazine for daring to write about his mental peculiarity. Thus do the shrinks stay mum as our sleepy, slurring, giraffe-drawing-identifier-in-chief — whose vocabulary, according to recent studies, has gone from an 11th-grade level to a 4th-grade level– is confirmed by the White House medical team as being perfectly sound in brain and body.
The boy ain’t right
So who is left to point out the obvious? Us.
We use our intuition and common sense. If we heard about someone who needed a squadron of secret police to protect them from their critics, wouldn’t our first thought be to wonder, how insecure must that person feel inside?
If we knew a teenager who fantasized about paving over a beautiful garden of roses, wouldn’t we worry about the kid? If we were a teacher and a student divulged that he’d like to send masked goons to ambush families off the street and push them into black vans, we’d be legally required to notify the authorities.
If a family member took a wrecking ball to an old building beloved by millions and potent with symbolism, in order to make room for a golden playpen financed by bribes, we might stage an intervention. What about if we found out the neighbor kid had responded to a peaceful demonstration by designing a graphic dumping feces on the protesters? We’d forbid our kids from playing with him.
Any of these scenarios would make a sane person feel sick to their stomach. They are not political moves. They are the eruptions of a disturbed mind.
Every S needs an M
The only way a narcissist can self-soothe is to inflict pain on the imagined source of his wound. In Trump’s case, the lost 2020 election, the mug hosts, the many times he was hauled into courtrooms – his sadistic revenge is upon the whole US public. — hype.r.vigilance
Trump’s consiglieri, Stephen Miller, seems to warrant this term as well, given his venomous screeds, his pogroms against immigrants… even his face.
Underlings in all despotic regimes feel they’d be excluded in a normal world, so they double down on their own abnormality. In this case, Trump enables these people, and they enable him. – Wolf, op cit
Did we not detect a savor of sadism in Trump’s handling of food insecurity during the shutdown? He went so far as to defy a court order 
that would force the use of emergency funds to feed the hungry.
Adding another layer of collective psychology to this stew is the fact that most of these impoverished families probably voted for him. If it is true
that every sadist needs a masochist, are we seeing here the M to go with Trump’s S?
Since Trump won, his diehard fans have been screwed every which way. They’ve suffered the indignity of his ludicrously broken campaign promises, including economic relief and the release of the Epstein files. They’ve bought his bibles, his bogus coins, and the the rest of the miserable merch that bears his name.
He sticks a straw in his supporters and sucks in the cash like a CapriSun. — Stephen Colbert
Yet a good portion of these folks — 42%, according to the polls — still revere this guy as their savior.
Frederick Woodruff points out that the humiliations endured by MAGA loyalists represent a form of masochistic sacrifice. In this dynamic, the more suffering one takes on, the closer one is to the god/ king. He cites Camille Paglia:
[A]s a culture loses its ethical center (i.e. a conscience) through debauchery and decadence, it turns to sado-masochism as a way to regain some type of ‘grounding:’ a reassertion of primitive power dynamics.
After the Blue Wave
So what will our sundowning autocrat do now, in the aftermath of the Blue Wave?
He will double down. We already know he doesn’t admit error, he doesn’t change tack. He’s a one-trick pony.
So let us name what we are dealing with. This is a man who gives his fans a rage target by conjuring imaginary enemies like “antifa” (presumably we are not supposed to be anti-fascist; so are we supposed to be pro-fascist?), along with imaginary wars (carnage in the streets of Democratic cities).
Unfortunately, he is deploying real troops to fight them.
He can do a lot of damage while he’s still in the White House.
Let’s look further ahead, too, to the time when, sooner or later, El Donaldo will succumb to the only foe whose consequences he will not be able to escape: the tall guy with the scythe.
