American Mercury
American Mercury
Analysis of the Astrology of Donald J. Trump
Upcoming classes: Psycho-Cosmos and Simone Weil
GEMINI SUN, LEO RISING, SAGITTARIUS MOON
Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States, is a Gemini, a mutable air sign ruled by Mercury, which takes tremendous pleasure in communication. The start of his cosmic map—his moment of sunrise—happens at the final and fatal degree of Leo, which is the brightest star in that leonine constellation, and is also known as Regulus, meaning “a petty king or ruler.” Regulus has long been associated with the drama of ascensions and falls, rulership and royalty. Indeed, a recent New York Times headline reads: “Harris Asks Voters to Choose Unity Over a ‘Petty Tyrant.’”
His moon is a full moon in Sagittarius. More than full, it is supercharged, steroidal—about to burst—because Trump was born on a total lunar eclipse—June 14, 1946. The ancients viewed a lunar eclipse as an omen of immense change. For them, the sun and moon were gods. During a lunar eclipse, a god gets blocked, destroyed, devoured. A new vision, for better or worse, follows.
He has many planets in Cancer and Leo, which some modern astrologers refer to as the most personal signs of the zodiac, as they preside over our centers: chest, heart, womb. The time in our lives when we first learned the terrifying thrill of words—-when we said wild things to test boundaries and clapped our hands excitedly at the results, is everywhere in Trump’s astrology.
MERCURY AND THE WEAVE
He has three important planets in the maternal, nourishing water sign of Cancer (which is his 12th house): Mercury, Saturn, Venus. From Cancer, his natal Mercury sends fuel and resources to that Gemini sun. So his Mercury—-microphone, medium, messaging system, voice—-is located in the 12th house, which holds the most hidden parts of the chart, self, society. The 12th house is associated with the unconscious, our hidden enemies, or perhaps the “enemy within” our own selves. The ancients felt this zone was about “self-undoing.” Known for saying “the quiet part out loud,” Trump moves the twin motors of his Gemini hands in and out.
Washington Post: “How Trump talks: Abrupt shifts, profane insults, confusing sentences.”
MSNBC: “Why the growing list of Donald Trump’s verbal missteps matter.”
ABC: “Inside ‘the weave’: How Donald Trump’s rhetoric has grown darker and windier.”
The Atlantic: “Trump is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.”
Mercury, ruler of Trump’s sun, is a psychopomp, a windy mediator between unconscious and conscious, night and day. “Many-sided, changeable, and deceitful.,” as C.G. Jung wrote in “The Spirit Mercurius,” wherein Jung also described Mercury as “two dragons,” “twin,” of “two natures” or “two substances,” and quoted an old-school alchemist who wrote that Mercury “runs round the earth and enjoys equally the company of the good and the wicked.” In other words, Mercury reveals how the same substance which fucks us up, leads us into the underworld, is what helps us escape.
Mercury, as medium and messenger, peculiar thermometer, makes himself invisible. To read Mercury, we must pay attention to the air around him. Don’t kill the messenger, but observe what he stirs—-what he hides and makes known—showing us the sides, polarities—their and our own dangers and hilarities.
“You’ve got to weave it out,” Trump told Joe Rogan. When making a speech, he says, to simply read from a teleprompter is boring. So, he weaves in stories, taking trips with verbiage. Sometimes, as Rogan points out, his verbal weaves get “wild.”
He repeats words, as if he likes how they feel in his mouth. “Tad,” he says, “Tad,” weaving a tale of his first visit to the Lincoln Bedroom after becoming president, focusing on the early death of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln’s son, Tad. “Tad.”
As he speaks, his hands move in and out, in and out. “Tad, Tad.”
With Mercury, words get looser, weirder, fly away, disperse, then lodge in our heads and hearts, where they flower into pleasantness or offensiveness, grow to excite and/or injure.
MERCURY, TRICKY GUIDE
The alchemists of yore thought of Mercury—excitable, wild, and effervescent—as their guide into the tricky, soul-building, gold-making process of alchemical work. But, they knew he was not to be totally trusted. As their adage goes: many have perished in the work. For Mercury is not like the other gods. He is not up on the mountain, but flitting around, both shit stirrer and truth procedure; poison and cure, depending on method of administration and dose. To study Mercury, to follow the wild weaves, is to expand one’s mind and to risk going mad.
Gemini, an electric court jester, uses incendiary rhetoric and jokes to diffuse and to stoke. Trump declares that his rhetoric—-comic, inflammatory, and offensive, kept us out of wars.
He’s gone too far. Too much. Crossed the line.
What would the news—on either side—do without Trump: his images, grandiose verbiage, and offenses?
Trump did not create our mercurial arena, our long and deranging hallways of mirrors, silvery streams of clicks and words and hyperlinks and news, fake and true—but he is a kind of guide to its kingdom, a taker of the national temperature.
To read Trump as either “savior” or “Hitler,” angel or demon, divider or uniter, is to neglect the intriguing and ambiguous energy of Mercury, which, in its alchemical role, divides and unites. But then again, Mercury is famously deranging (cc: Trump Derangement Syndrome) and so it is easier to pedestal or diss him than to study him from a distance.
