A trio of stories this summer show Donald Trump in his best worst light, from financial disclosure documents that reveal a stunning level of corruption, to a quick-change flight plan that left Cabinet members and reporters hung out as bait, and renewed pressure on NATO allies to cough up territories to which he hasn’t the shadow of a right. It’s the Summer of The Donald – heated, sticky and oppressive.
June 2026 saw a bevy of controversies, eccentricities, and record setting. If this is what Uranus in Gemini is going to be like, hold onto your hats for the next seven years! Throughout, referential asteroids in significant placement tell the tales, from an NBA championship to an insulted Italian Prime Minister, a tentative peace deal, a rectified name change, and the world’s first trillionaire.
Somewhere in the midst of all the fireworks and monument upgrades, the competing nonpartisan and partisan 250th birthday celebrations, the gilding and ballroom-building, and the Octagon-style cage matches on the White House lawn, is a weakened, tired, mentally-challenged old man, tuning 80 and facing his mortality. Badly.
One of the main pillars of the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) movement, and a major component of that coalition, has been conspiracy theories and theorists. From the JFK and MLKJ assassinations to the moon landing and Clinton-sponsored pedophile rings run out of pizza shops, conspiracy is the air many MAGA folks breathe. And one of the most popularized conspiracy theories involved Jeffrey Epstein, credibly accused of having sex with underage girls, and sharing this illicit activity with numerous well-heeled, famous friends and acquaintances. Epstein never came to trial, having died in prison of an apparent suicide, but was rumored to have a secret client list naming his cohorts; his manner of death was also judged suspicious in MAGA world.
Donald J. Trump’s particular genius for creating chaos and mayhem was on full display in the first month after his second inauguration on 20 January 2025. A flurry of executive orders mandating everything from the end of birthright citizenship (a constitutionally enshrined right which requires an amendment ratified by three-fourths of the states to alter) to the quixotic renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America” (and would you like Freedom Fries with that?) was just the beginning. Most of the heavy lifting of dismantling the federal government was consigned to Elon Musk and his fabricated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who has proceeded to reflexively fire or eliminate thousands of workers with civil service protections and close entire agencies without congressional authority. Freezes on funding, hiring, and dispensing approved funds have rounded out DOGE’s resume.
Donald J. Trump’s second administration, taking power at noon on 20 January 2025 (by constitutional fiat, whenever the oath itself is taken), is likely to be a replay of the first term, only more so. In 2017 when he first assumed office, Trump was a newbie novice to the Washington scene; he appointed persons with experience and relative competence to help him run the government, individuals who had a respect for its institutions and norms, who served as guardrails on Trump’s wilder, wackier impulses.
