A truly terrifying expose of the chaos, incompetence, ignorant and wilfully uncaring transition into Trump’s shambolic administration comes in Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk out in October. He’s the author of The Big Short, made into a Brad Pitt film, which managed to make understandable the impenetrable complexities of the over-leveraged banking derivatives which led to the 2008 crash.
Transition preparations are mandatory for both presidential nominees in the months before the election to ensure the machinery of government with 2 million employees runs smoothly. When this was explained to Trump, according to Lewis, he responded ‘Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law.’ At one point he turned to Chris Christie and said: “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”
“Trump was going to handle the transition more or less by himself. Not even Bannon thought this was a good idea. “I was fucking nervous as shit,” Bannon later told friends. “I go, ‘Holy fuck, this guy [Trump] doesn’t know anything. And he doesn’t give a shit.’”
“The election happened,” remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. “And then there was radio silence.”
Lewis was born 15 October 1960, New Orleans, the son of a corporate lawyer and a community activist, started out studying art, then economics, worked for the investment bank Salomon Brothers and became finally a financial journalist. He is a Sun Libra sextile Jupiter in crusading Sagittarius; with a Half Grand Sextile of a tough Saturn in Capricorn opposition Mars, sextile/trine Neptune and Pluto – not short of discipline, determination or ambition. He also has in addition to Neptune, Mercury and Venus in Scorpio (good for research) square Uranus (outspoken).
His relationship chart with Trump has a composite power-struggling Sun Pluto; with a suspicious composite Neptune Saturn in a can-be-fanatical square to Uranus. It’s under heavy pressure now with tr Pluto square the Saturn and rocking n’ rolling through 2019 with tr Pluto opposition the composite Uranus and square Neptune. Plus an explosive tr Uranus square the composite Mars Node from April 2019 onwards.
Worth a read of the excerpt below, which includes an intriguing nugget about the Pences.
Add on 2 October 2018: An interview with Lewis in The Times says he can imagine two ways in which the Trump era ends in calamity. One is he defaults on US sovereign debt, as he often walked away from his company’s debts in business. “He could precipitate a financial crisis that would make the 2008 crisis seem trivial.” And a run on the dollar. “We have $20 trillion in debt and he’s jacking up the deficit in ways that we haven’t seen in a long time and he has no compunction about stiffing creditors.”
The second stems from his disinterest in how the US government works and its ability to cope with major crises, so if one arose he would be exposed. He has “a lot of strange mental deficiencies, and one of them is he really doesn’t learn. He’s intimidated by any kind of complexity.”
‘I think that he’s not that interesting. I think he’s a very simple character. I think there’s not much there. This isn’t an electronic device, it’s a mechanical device. It’s an on-off switch kind of thing. You can understand it pretty easily.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/times2/michael-lewis-trump-could-trigger-a-financial-crisis-b3lqbw0ks
It fits Kissinger’s reluctantly expressed thought that Trump is the kind of figure who turns up unwittingly at the end of a phase – he described him as an ‘accident’ who has no alternative plan but is there to upend the established order.
A joker makes the same point even more tellingly – a trickster, a wrecker, at times an enlightener. From the Latin follis for windbag, a pair of bellows. Also associated with the phallus and lewdness.
I was wondering about the USA’s first Pluto Return coming within in 2022/23. It’s tricky to find countries with established start dates that are old enough to have had Pluto returns.
I had a quick look at England 9 May 973 AD chart – its’ Pluto returns were circa 1216 for the Magna Carta; 1463 in the midst of the War of the Roses; 1708/09 just after the Scotland Union of 1701 and just before the start of the Hanoverian Monarchy in 1714; and 1955 as the empire was crumbling and the EEC was beckoning.
Spain 19 June 1479 had Pluto Returns around 1725; and in 1972 just before Franco died and it became a democracy.
Some dates for you to play with Hugh as a historian.
What is intriguing about Trump’s Harmonics is the way in which Saturn Uranus Neptune are tied tightly together in his 5, 10 and 15 Harmonic charts – it does suggest he’s tied into the zeitgeist, perhaps as a puppet of the fates, since he appears to have scrambled brains at a personal level.
I dont thnk Trump believes in anything but Trump so all the traditional political narratives and play book responses doont work with him.
I am quite sure that he will volte face on issues as his mood takes him. In addition he is quite happy to send out mixed messages on almost any topic. Creating confusion has been his modus operandi in business for years
Trump also has that Cheshire Cat smile which rather reminds me of Alice In Wonderland.
“I But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where –” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“– so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
To me Trump represents quite literally nothing which is I suspect is why he is such a challenge to so many people. When he has finished he will simply vanish leaving that grin behind. Of course, the challenge to humanity is to choose the right road from nowhere to somewhere and tio ensure that where we are going is the right place. That is the Saturn Pluto challenge. I am not sure at the moment we are upto it.
If you’re into psychobabble, a couple of Trump thoughts:
‘…..continually chaotic lives may be a function of a high degree of narcissism. They may not actually enjoy the state of frenzy, but instead are driven to give off this impression to cover up feelings of despair and lack of importance. The disruption they cause in everyone else’s lives is part of the pattern of needing to fuel their sense of self-importance.’
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201805/is-what-narcissists-thrive
A Freudian shrink is even more explicit about the effects of his mother’s lack of empathy and absence during his childhood and his tyrant father. “He is infantile. He’s dominated by impulses, by suspicion, by a need to always win, by a fantasy that he has to do everything himself.’ He talks of his unconscious incestuous fantasies about Ivanka and misogyny. In typically Freudian terms he describes Trump’s scattergun tweeting as faecalisation –‘ He is covering all of us with his productions. It’s something that we see in young children who are both exuberant and angry at the same time.” “He talks about shithole countries, he talks about shit, he talks about dirty Mexicans, people who are dark and dirty. Those are all related to germ-phobia and related to his own fecal fantasies and issues.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/29/trump-on-the-couch-justin-frank
“When America elected this buffoon as POTUS, they swopped sanity for stupidity.” Where I disagree with a lot of people in this post is that the insanity in the United States is on many more levels than our crazy president. Just look around you. Celebrity triumphs over intellectualism in every way.
Absolutely.
Remember the astrology is the same who ever became President in 2016. Trump is the product of the ongoing historical process not its cause particularly as he is essentially a political outsider who was not the favoured candidate for his own party’s established
politicians. His election should have been a wake up call to both Republican and Democrats sitting in Washington to do some serious soul searching about the way politics operates in the US but it seems they prefer to keep repeating the old mantras with new twists. What we are seeing now is conflict between established vested interest groups with Trump the unpredictable joker in the pack not some revolutionary struggle. For ordinary American workers wages and living standards have been either stagnating or declining for decades regardless of who ran Congress or whether the President was Republican or Democrat. There is nothing to suggest the current freak show in Washington is going to change that situation regardless of who wins. Worth noting that Francis Fukuyama who prematurely announced the End Of History (that was a book with a hubristic title if ever I saw one) started fretting about America In Decay in 2014 which is before Trump even ran for nomination. Saturn Pluto demands fundamental change but I am not sure any politicians or institutions in the western world or particularly the USA are ready to truly embrace it. Therefore they will have to learn the lesson the hard way and have it forced on them.
Trump is the living embodiment of the classic line by Groucho Marx :-
“He looks like an idiot and talks like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He is an idiot.”
When America elected this buffoon as POTUS, they swopped sanity for stupidity.
Sadly they will pay a terrible price for their folly, politically and financially.
Trump maybe an idiot but that also make him the Fool in the Tarot, the wild card or the Joker in the pack. In the Tarot his appearance requires people to break old habits and to adopt new ways. I don’ t see any sign of that in US politics where the tacit assumption by both Republicans and Democrats is that the post Trump world will be a return to pre Trump norms. More worryingly Trump has something of the original Harlequin about him who was an emissary if the devil who led the damned on the dance to hell. And I dont just mean the people who voted for him in that description but his opponents as well. I think Trump is a fated character for the USA in so many ways that can not be caught by normal political discourse and whose destiny in some ways lies outside his own or anyone elses control.
As an addendum in Tarot the card game rather than the major Arcana the Fool is quite literally a Trump card with no number who cannot be taken.
Maybe Fate is having a quiet laugh at all the rest of us there.
Beyond satire, just terrifying and the way Trump conducts himself ( e.g that awful press conference yesterday) it is no stretch to believe it to be true.
Good lord. The entire excerpt is frightening. Although with some, er, comic relief: “..the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. “Trump was like … I love the Bangles! You know that song Walk Like an Egyptian?” recalled one of his advisers on the scene.”
On FB this week, a high school acquaintance who I thought was likely a Trump supporter, though rarely posts anything political, said he and his wife watched yesterday’s press conference from a bar in the Caribbean and everyone was laughing. He saw that Trump was a complete idiot and utterly crazy. At least some of his supporters must be peeling off…
The satirists are having a field day. See: Jimmy Kimmel Destroys Trump’s ‘Angry, Jumbled, Dishonest’ Press Conference.
The late-night host told his viewers, “The wheels are off the wagon. ‘It’s time to put grandpa in an assisted-living facility because he cannot care for himself.’
“You know, they say Rod Rosenstein wanted to tape him to show everyone he’s nuts? Not necessary, he did it himself.” He said that Tom Arnold can “call off the search” for the incriminating Trump tapes and joked, “They could easily have sold this thing to Netflix as a comedy special.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jimmy-kimmel-destroys-trumps-angry-jumbled-dishonest-press-conference?ref=home