Wizard's Weekly Wrap-Up: A Pirate President & the World in the Mirror
Dementia Denials, Doctored Declarations, Caracas Chaos & Cancer Moon Truths: The Week That Was December 28, 2025-January 3, 2026
This week was one of noise and spectacle, of missiles and mockery, as the world was forced to face its own reflection. But beneath the fiasco and the fireworks, as the empire carried on cracking and the spell continued to break, below the rubble something brighter and better bloomed.
2025 ended with a bang, and not just the fireworks kind. In the final days of the year, China staged its largest Taiwan drills yet, surrounding the island with warships, aircraft, and simulated blockades to make sure no one - especially the U.S. - missed the point after America’s recent arms package deployment to Taipei. Tehran declared it was now in a “full-scale war” with the West while Trump met with Netanyahu in Florida like two Bond villains, vowing to strike back if Iran so much as sneezes in the direction of enrichment. Then Trump announced he’d asked the Israeli president to fully pardon Netanyahu - a war crimes bromance sealed with delusion and impunity. A fitting end to a year defined by corruption, calamity, and collapse.
Standing shoulder to shoulder with Bibi, Trump casually dropped that the U.S. had “knocked out” a major drug facility in Venezuela - complete with explosions, boats, and dockyards - as if reciting a Tom Clancy plot he barely skimmed. At that moment, the White House, the CIA and the military all had no comment and no details, and even Venezuela seemingly had no idea it had been attacked. It took days before the CIA finally confirmed that a limited drone strike had taken place, but in the meantime the press was left doing somersaults, trying to cover a presidential military strike that may or may not have happened - treating Trump’s statement less like policy and more like a conspiracy theory with good branding. In Trump’s America, presidential declarations have become like Reddit threads - unverified until proven otherwise.
To complicate the narrative even further, The New York Times uncovered the first physical evidence of Trump’s recent supposed “anti-drug” strikes in the Caribbean: a burned boat washed ashore in Colombia, holding no fentanyl or cocaine - just scorched marijuana packets. So much for the narco-terrorist storyline. As the year came to a close, it became clear that the Trump administration has been blowing boats out of the water for reasons still uncertain, but that may have violated international law and crossed into the terrain of war crimes. Happy new year!
Then, on the eve of yet another high-stakes meeting between Ukranian president Zelenskyy and Trump, Russia unleashed a wave of missiles and drones on Kyiv, killing civilians and injuring dozens - a calculated move ahead of peace talks. Then Moscow claimed that Ukraine had launched a drone strike on Putin’s private residence, even producing “evidence” that Western intelligence, including the CIA, dismissed as pure fiction - a textbook false flag, conveniently timed to derail diplomacy. Trump, of course, took Putin’s call and parroted the Kremlin line like it came straight from the Mar-a-Lago room service menu.
After Zelenskyy met with Trump at his private club in Florida, (the obvious location for high level peace talks) Trump claimed Putin was eager to help Ukraine “succeed.” Funny way of showing it, by relentlessly bombing them into oblivion for the last four years. Then, Trump defended his unwavering trust in Putin by pointing to their shared trauma over the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” - it was an American president standing in emotional alignment with the aggressor, while pressuring the victim to concede territory, and possibly their future.
Trump ended the year far worse off than he started, literally limping into the new year and bleeding approval. His job ratings have slid into the low-40s nationally, with disapproval solidly entrenched above 55 percent. Independents have abandoned him in droves, and even his strongest issue, the economy, is now a liability. These are the kind of numbers that tell you a president is losing the middle, exhausting his base, and governing on borrowed time, and you don’t have to believe the polls - just listen to his fiercest supporters who are rapidly jumping ship.
In a blistering interview with The New York Times, Marjorie Taylor Greene revealed she finally hit her limit due to Trump’s fury over her push to release the Epstein files and advocate for survivors. According to Greene, Trump warned her: “my friends will get hurt.” She also pointed to Trump’s venom-laced eulogy for Charlie Kirk, where he praised “hating” one’s enemies, and said it revealed a spiritual bankruptcy she could no longer ignore. “I was so naive,” she said, which might explain the Jewish space lasers.
Greene’s exit from Congress, and her public rupture with Trump, has become one of the clearest signs that the MAGA monolith is starting to crack from within. And she’s not alone. Republican Representative Lauren Boebert lashed out at Trump after he used his first veto of the term to block a bipartisan clean water bill she co-sponsored. The bill passed Congress unanimously and would’ve finished a major water project in Colorado, but Boebert had joined Greene in forcing a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and now suspects the veto was revenge. Because nothing says presidential priorities like tanking a water bill to protect a sex trafficking cover-up.
The constant drip of Epstein revelations have revealed the ugly truth about Trump, as it becomes clearer exactly why he’s been trying to desperately to stop the files from being released. This week The Wall Street Journal published new details on the incident that got Jeffrey Epstein banned from Mar-a-Lago: an 18-year-old spa worker said Epstein pressured her for sex. According to the report, everyone at the spa knew Epstein was a creep, and Trump knew Epstein was targeting young women and kept sending them to him anyway. And yet, the revelation passed like weather, mostly because Trump keeps finding ways to distract from the bad news by creating some of his own.
When a 23-year-old YouTuber dropped a conspiracy video falsely accusing Somali-run daycare centers of fraud with no evidence (just racist fear-mongering in high def) Trump responded by freezing all federal daycare funding across the country. All of it, to every state. Though the video was swiftly debunked, the funding remains frozen - a convenient distraction from a president willing to shield predators, retaliate against those who push for accountability, and weaponise public policy against children just to change the subject.
As the New Year rang in, while Anderson Cooper drunkenly recited the lyrics to Taylor Swift’s song “Wood” and Stephen Colbert confessed to being a “bossy bottom” on live TV, Russian shortwave signals - normally a dull Cold War-era buzz - suddenly broke into Swan Lake, the unofficial musical score for regime change. Since Swan Lake only ever plays when something weird is going down in the Kremlin, whispers of Putin’s death went viral, until he appeared just in time to deliver his New Year’s address, still alive and still lying. At least some traditions remain intact.
Down in Peru, a circle of barefoot shamans gathered on a Lima beach to make their annual predictions for the year ahead, forecasting a serious illness for Donald Trump, exile for Nicolas Maduro, and an end to the war in Ukraine - a trio of outcomes that might have sounded wild had they not been already dancing through the astrological charts (and some would come true before the week was out).
Back in Washington, every artist scheduled to perform on New Year’s Eve at the Kennedy Center promptly pulled out after Trump slapped his name on the building and then began publicly calling for the removal of the Kennedy name altogether. The concert was canceled in protest, but the most important headline of the night was buried under the glitter as the House Judiciary Committee quietly released the full deposition transcript from former special counsel Jack Smith. The testimony made it devastatingly clear that Trump knowingly attempted to overturn the 2020 election. January 6 wasn’t a misunderstanding or a riot gone sideways - it was a plotted attempt to hijack democracy. The evidence was overwhelming, the conduct was documented, and the legal standard to prosecute was met. In any functioning republic, that would have been game over, but instead, it was just another PDF in the archives of the absurd. Trump remained in charge, shielded by the very office he tried to steal.
As the final hours of 2025 burned away, so did a piece of Amsterdam’s soul as the 150-year-old Vondelkerk went up in flames, a sacred spire collapsing into ash as the city counted down toward midnight. Across the continent, a bar in Switzerland ignited after a sparkler stunt went horribly wrong, killing 40 people and injuring more than 100. And in America, the president had a social media meltdown.
Trump rang in the New Year by tweeting about the removal of National Guard troops from Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland, claiming crime was down, when in fact the Supreme Court had just blocked his illegal deployment. From there, he spiralled, ranting online about Democrats, screaming about voter ID, and then - in a surreal twist - sharing a New York Post article accusing Putin of being a liar “standing in the way of peace.” Then he descended into the Mar-a-Lago ballroom (dragging his dead leg behind him), where an artist painted a live portrait of Jesus during the New Year’s festivities, which Trump swiftly auctioned off for $2.5 million. And all this as the Affordable Care Act subsidies quietly expired in the background and millions now face skyrocketing insurance premiums. Because nothing says “America First” like gutting the nation’s healthcare while auctioning off Christ for a mint in the ballroom downstairs.
As 2026 blinked into being, a rare note of hope echoed up from the underground as Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as Mayor of New York City, and the first move from the Democratic socialist was to rescind every executive order Eric Adams signed in his final months. His inaugural address wasted no time: “I have been told this is the occasion to reset expectations… I will do no such thing. The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations.” And just like that, the bar was raised in the city that built the skyline, not with swagger, but with substance.
But just as a different future cracked open in the city, the old world coughed up another warning. Saks - the department store synonymous with luxury - announced it was preparing to file for bankruptcy after defaulting on a $100M+ interest payment tied to the Neiman Marcus deal. Then CNBC went off-script and admitted that Trump’s second term has now seen seven straight months of manufacturing job decline; the kind of economic news that used to end presidencies, now just another statistic waiting for a denial tweet and an FCC threat to pull the network’s license.
By the time the Cancer Full Moon began to rise, the American presidency had entered full dissociation mode. 60 Minutes reported that federal judges are now openly accusing the Trump administration of repeatedly lying in court - falsifying records, forging declarations, and making bogus statements. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal dumped a piece detailing Trump’s declining health where he admitted he takes more aspirin than his doctors recommend, prompting the internet to ask how he didn’t bleed out after being shot in the ear last year in Butler. Then he revealed he once tried wearing compression socks for chronic venous insufficiency but gave up because he “didn’t like them.” Sure, let’s see how that goes. Honestly, those shamans in Peru might be onto something.
After bragging for weeks about getting an MRI at Walter Reed, Trump now says it was just a CT scan thought he still won’t say what it was for. After the article dropped, Trump went online to announce that he “ACED” his third straight cognitive exam - the kind used to screen for dementia, which means his doctors have tested him for dementia three times in one year. Which means they’re not doing it for fun. Which means, well... you know exactly what it means.
And just when you thought this storyline couldn’t tip further into surrealism, it did. Trump - flanked by loyalists in a makeshift SCIF made of black fabric stitched together with bulldog clips in a Mar-a-Lago function room - ordered a military airstrike on Venezuela. Caracas was rocked by explosions, low-flying U.S. aircraft tore through the night, killing at least 40 civilians and military personnel after bombs hit a three-story apartment building. Amidst the madness, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was captured and flown out of the country to face trial in the U.S.
At a press conference inside the Mar-a-Lago tea room, Trump struggled to stay awake while General Dan Caine tried to piece together a narrative for the strike. Trump woke up just long enough to call the operation “an assault like people have not seen since World War II.” Slurring his words and repeating himself as he read from a script (and occasionally wandered off it), Trump said it was “one of the most stunning effective and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history.”
Answering questions about what happens next for Venezuela, he insulted Maria Corina Machado - the Venezuelan opposition leader and recent Nobel Peace Prize recipient who seems to be feverishly supporting the armed takeover of her country - saying she lacked the support to govern, before announcing that Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s Vice President, had been sworn in as interim President and the United States would now essentially “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” offering no plan, no structure, and no sense of how any of this would work.
Trump, the self-branded “Peace President,” has bombed seven countries in the first year of his second term: Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria, Syria, Iran, and now Venezuela (that’s more than any other president in the same period). He says with the invasion of Venezuela that he’s trying to stop the flow of drugs like fentanyl into the U.S., but the facts don’t add up. Just weeks ago, Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras for trafficking hundreds of tonnes of cocaine into the United States, which makes it hard to believe he’s really concerned about the drugs. Venezuela doesn’t even produce fentanyl, and it doesn’t have a cartel infrastructure, but what it does have is the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Seen in that light, everything makes sense - the narco line was just branding.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laid it bare: “It’s not about drugs. If it was, Trump wouldn’t have pardoned one of the largest narco traffickers in the world last month. It’s about oil and regime change. And they need a trial now to pretend it isn’t. Especially to distract from Epstein + skyrocketing healthcare costs.” Yes, another Trump distraction for the Epsteinth time.
Even Marjorie Taylor Greene asked the obvious: “If this was really about protecting American lives from drugs, why hasn’t the Trump administration taken action against the Mexican cartels - who are actually responsible for fentanyl deaths?…..Why is it okay for America to bomb and kidnap a foreign leader, but Russia is evil for invading Ukraine and China is bad for aggression against Taiwan? Is it only okay if we do it?”
Trump confirmed his focus on Venezuela’s oil, saying “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country…..This partnership of Venezuela with the United States of America will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe.” If such a mission required U.S. troops on the ground in Venezuela, he said, the administration was not afraid of such deployment.
Marj had a response to that one too, hitting the point home that “Americans disgust with our own government’s never ending military aggression and support of foreign wars is justified because we are forced to pay for it and both parties, Republicans and Democrats, always keep the Washington military machine funded and going. This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy were we wrong.”
Someone get the hose because Marjorie Taylor Greene is on fire.
It was a rare moment of bipartisan disgust. Senator Elizabeth Warren called the strike “dangerous military adventurism.” Bernie Sanders reminded the country that “Trump is failing in his job to “run” the United States. He should not be trying to “run” Venezuela.” And Jim Himes, top Democrat on the House Intel Committee, dropped the legal sledgehammer: “I’ve seen no evidence Maduro posed an imminent threat that would justify military action without Congressional approval.”
Because that’s the real issue here: Congress was never told. Neither was the Senate Armed Services Committee. There was no vote, and no warning. No strategy at all. According to the Constitution, war powers reside with Congress. What Trump did wasn’t just reckless - it was illegal. A violation of U.S. law, international law, and Article 2 of the U.N. Charter.
Colombia and Mexico immediately called for the U.N. Security Council to convene, to which Trump warned Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro that he has to “watch his ass,” said “Cuba is going to be something we’ll end up talking about,” and warned that “something will have to be done about Mexico….American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
Eventually, even newly sworn in Delcy Rodríguez condemned the U.S. operation, calling Maduro the “only legitimate president”, and demanding his release - directly contradicting Trump’s assertion that she happily accepted control and inferring the U.S. strike was exactly what it was: an invasion. “If there is one thing that the Venezuelan people and this country are clear about,” she said, “it is that we will never again be slaves, that we will never again be a colony of any empire, whatever its nature.”
Venezuela isn’t some small, fragile state you can knock over with a few airstrikes and a press conference. It’s twice the size of California and home to 28 million people, many of whom still support Maduro. His government hasn’t collapsed; it’s largely intact. That support includes heavily armed narcotics networks with roots in Colombia’s guerrilla wars, and a standing military of more than 100,000 soldiers. This is not a vacuum. It’s a country with depth, structure, and force behind it.
Trump clearly has no plan for what happens next. Though he told reporters that administration officials were “designating various people” to “run” Venezuela, “and we’re gonna let you know who those people are,” it’s increasingly clear he has no roadmap and no endgame. Just a rogue operation launched by a man with swelling legs, a bruised ego, and a dangerous belief that war makes good theatre.
This is regime change under Trump 2.0: no law, no strategy, no moral high ground. Just force and performance. Piracy and PR. A man who auctioned off a painting of Jesus on New Year’s Eve is now auditioning for emperor of the Western Hemisphere. God help us all.
But this isn’t a new rupture. It’s an old American reflex, just stripped of shame. The U.S. has spent a century intervening, toppling, and managing other nations. The major difference now is that it’s happening out loud, in daylight, without the euphemisms, and without any logical or methodical planning. The empire isn’t acting differently - it’s just stopped pretending, or playing by the rules.
Here in 2026, we are living through the final collapse of illusion. The mask is off, the rot is visible, and Trump is holding the mirror up - to America, to the world, and to himself - and the reflection we all see is truly grotesque. But that’s the point. Sometimes the mirror has to crack before we can see what needs cutting away.
This is a moment of reckoning for all of us. A collective mirror moment - like glancing at our post-holiday bloat and finally realizing it’s time to cut the sugar. What we’re seeing now isn’t the end - it’s the diagnosis. What’s loud right now is not what’s prevailing - it’s what’s collapsing. It’s the death rattle of the unsustainable, and the louder it gets, the easier it is to miss what’s quietly blooming beneath. That’s the sleight of hand of empire’s end: distraction disguised as dominance.
But we’re not here to stare at the fire.
We’re here to tend the garden behind it.
So if you want to know what’s really moving under the noise - what this moment means, what it’s asking of us, and how to walk through it with your integrity and your sanity intact - then read on.
Let’s make meaning of the madness,
Trace the architecture beneath the chaos,
And walk forward with eyes open,
Tuned to the clarity blooming beneath collapse.
**The cosmic insights shared here are mapped to the real movements of the heavens during the past week. If you want to know more about planetary pattern recognition, read about it here**
The Ashes of Disconnected Divinity
Perhaps the clearest marker of the times we live in unfurled on the final night of the year, while fireworks split the sky and the world counted down into 2026, fire of a different kind found its way into one of Amsterdam’s quiet sentinels, as a 150-year-old church burned to the ground.
At first it was only smoke, the kind mistaken for fireworks haze, drifting around the spires of the Vondelkerk. But then the flames climbed, and by the time sirens cut through the celebration, the fire had already reached the tower. Witnesses watched the spire buckle and fall, not in a dramatic explosion, but with a heavy, final collapse, like the sound of a long-held breath being let go. Parts of the roof followed, as embers rained down onto the square like a cruel echo of celebration confetti.
Fire crews fought it for hours, but the damage was decisive, and by morning, officials said what everyone already knew: the building was unsalvageable. A church that had survived wars, occupations, revolutions, and reinventions didn’t make it into the new year. And that’s not just a headline, but a very clear message. A New Year’s address, not from a monarch or a leader, but from the universe itself.
Because the Vondelkerk was never just a church. It was a solution to a very specific historical problem: what to do with faith once the modern world began to take over.
It was built in the late 19th century, a time when Europe was trying to reconcile belief with reason, spirit with structure, and mystery with management. The age didn’t abolish faith - it domesticated it. It organised it and folded it neatly into schedules, hierarchies, and acceptable forms. The divine was given walls and timetables. It became something you booked. Something administered. Transcendence, by appointment.
Over time the Vondelkerk became little more than a beautiful shell. The sacred lingered only as atmosphere, as memory. Belief became something you entered, not something you inhabited. The building itself was deconsecrated decades ago - no longer a living site of devotion, just a preserved container for a past way of relating to meaning - which is why its burning, at the precise threshold of 2026, can be seen as a kind of closure, more than just a collapse, but a clear marker for the times.
This wasn’t the loss of faith - it was the letting go of a vessel that no longer fits.
For centuries, humanity has lived almost entirely from the mind - organising reality through concepts, systems, doctrines, and hierarchies. We’ve learned to understand the world intellectually, to control it, interpret it, and categorise it. Even our spirituality became a mental structure: beliefs to assent to, rules to follow, and institutions to belong to.
But the mind, for all its brilliance, is temporary. It is part of the apparatus of this lifetime - a tool, not a home. And somewhere along the way, we mistook the tool for the source.
The age now opening asks for a correction.
2026 is a hinge not because something explodes, but because something releases. The structures that once organised meaning are reaching the end of their lifespan. They aren’t being destroyed - they’re being completed. They’re being outgrown because their logic no longer matches the kind of perception we’re being invited into.
For centuries, we’ve been living in the mind, with little influence from the heart, using one without the other. Trying to think and reason our way to coherence, without accessing the part of us that speaks its language fluently.
The mind was never meant to lead - it’s just the vehicle through which the soul perceives. But we sidelined the soul in favour of the intellect. We chose coordination over coherence and thinking instead of feeling.
The mind needs something to lean on, and the soul is that something. The mind was always designed to be powered by the soul - the eternal steering the temporary, and the divine leading the human. But we tried to think our way to divinity, and all we built were structures that symbolised connection as monuments to our own disconnection.
And that’s why the fire on New Year’s Eve landed like it did. It wasn’t an accident - it was an announcement. A 19th-century house of ordered belief collapsing as the calendar turned into a century that will not be defined by institutions, but by coherence, reminds us that we don’t need a building to access the divine anymore. We don’t need a priest, a pulpit, or a sanctioned doorway. We don’t need a system to grant us access.
We are the access point.
The next era doesn’t ask us to gather beneath towers. It simply asks us to tune our own internal signal. To feel what’s real and trust what hums. To sense meaning directly - in the body, through resonance, in relationship with the soul.
Meaning no longer descends from above. It moves between us, laterally, subtly and relationally. And this is why so many old structures are faltering at once right now - not because people have lost faith, but because the architecture of authority itself is becoming obsolete. It was built for a mind-led world, but we’re stepping into one that requires soul-level presence.
The burning of the Vondelkerk can be read as tragedy - the loss of beauty, craft, and memory - but it can also be read as a signal. A closing image. The moment the scaffolding steps aside and the temple bows out. Because nothing sacred has been lost, only the illusion that it had to live in buildings.
The fire doesn’t say “nothing is holy anymore.” In fact, it says quite the opposite.
It says the holy is everywhere now.
It lives in bodies.
In breath.
In conscience.
In coherence.
In the quiet knowing that doesn’t need a roof.
The centre of gravity has shifted. Divinity has changed address. Truth no longer lives in what we built to hold it. What we once tried to grasp with the mind must now be felt through the heart.
The signal hasn’t disappeared - it’s just changed frequency. And as that shift continues - as more towers fall and more husks crumble - it won’t be destruction we’re watching, but transformation. A soft and final turning of the page, offering us a quiet invitation to stop outsourcing meaning. To stop looking up for permission. To remember the part of us that was always meant to receive directly. The part that outlives any system. The part that deeply knows.
As 2026 begins we’re being reminded of the only truth that matters now:
We were never meant to visit the temple.
We were meant to become it.
Indiana Jones and the Rock Rolling Off the Rails
The burning temple in Amsterdam was mirrored this week by a freak accident in Hollywood’s own Temple of Doom, when during a performance of the Indiana Jones stunt show at Disney Studios, the giant boulder that has rolled on cue for decades suddenly didn’t. The 400-pound prop slipped its track and came loose, veering toward the audience. A cast member rushed in and physically stopped it, taking the impact himself. The show halted, the illusion broke, and the machinery running behind the magic was suddenly exposed.
It’s hard not to read that image symbolically, just like the fire in Amsterdam. One of the most iconic set pieces in modern myth-making - a perfectly choreographed danger, designed to feel thrilling but safe - suddenly stopped obeying the script. What had always been contained, predictable, and engineered, suddenly slipped its groove and the system meant to simulate risk became genuinely risky. And it took a human body, not a control panel, to stop it.
That feels like yet another metaphor for this moment, as long standing structures thought to be safe are starting to lose their grip. The rails they’ve run on for decades are warping. The choreography is faltering and the illusion of mastery is cracking, and it’s ordinary people absorbing the impact when things go off-track.
There’s something quietly perfect about it happening inside a theme park: a place built to manage fantasy, narrative, and risk so completely that nothing real is supposed to break through. But it did. And in that moment, the line between spectacle and reality dissolved as the story stopped behaving.
Which is exactly the feeling of this threshold we’re crossing into now. Systems that once ran smoothly on repetition and spectacle are no longer holding their shape. What was designed to roll forever, on cue, is starting to wobble just enough to reveal that the track itself was never as solid as it looked.
Truth Archived, Consequence Delayed
While the world was distracted with the Vondelkerk burning and the rogue rock rolling in the Temple of Doom, Congress quietly released closed-door testimony from former special counsel Jack Smith on New Year’s Eve, offering the clearest official account yet of an investigation that concluded what has long been obscured by noise and denial: that the sitting president knowingly attempted to overturn the 2020 election; that January 6 did not happen by accident or confusion; and that prosecutors believed the evidence met the threshold required to bring charges and put the case before a jury.
Not inference.
Not implication.
Documented intent.
Corroborated conduct.
A clear causal chain.
Though Smith was prevented from discussing the section of his investigation pertaining to Trump’s mishandling of classified information (that portion has been blocked from release by Trump-friendly U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon until 24 February this year), previously released information indicates the investigation turned up evidence that Trump knowingly retained highly sensitive national defence documents after leaving office and repeatedly obstructed efforts to recover them.
According to the federal indictment Smith brought in 2023, Trump kept hundreds of classified files at his Mar-a-Lago estate - including documents concerning U.S. nuclear programmes, military plans, and potential vulnerabilities - stored in unsecured locations such as a ballroom, office spaces, and even a bathroom and shower. Prosecutors also alleged that Trump showed classified material to individuals without security clearance and encouraged aides and lawyers to hide or misrepresent the existence of the documents to investigators.
Smith told Congress that his team believed the evidence they had gathered supported criminal prosecution and that the case met the threshold required to proceed to trial. But the investigation never reached a jury because Smith was appointed special counsel nearly two years after the Capitol attack, by which point Trump was already positioning himself for a return to office. When Trump won the presidency again, the federal cases against him - including the classified documents case and the separate investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election - were closed without adjudication.
The result is a peculiar kind of institutional failure. The facts were gathered, the conduct was charged, and the evidence was preserved - yet no verdict was rendered. In Brazil, when former president Jair Bolsonaro incited an attempted insurrection, he was prosecuted and imprisoned. In the United States, a man accused of doing the same now occupies the highest office again. One system processed its breach while the other documented the breach in meticulous detail and then stopped, leaving the underlying questions formally unanswered. One converted truth into consequence, while the other simply archived it.
In another era, revelations of the magnitude of the ones released last week by Congress would have landed like an earthquake, but in this era, they arrived in a landscape already fractured, where proof no longer reliably produces consequence, and where the structures designed to translate truth into accountability struggle to function at all. The system did not reject the truth; it simply had nowhere left to hold it.
This is a failure of containment from a broken system that can describe wrongdoing fluently, document it meticulously, and preserve it indefinitely, yet no longer reliably act on it. Law still exists, and procedure still functions, but the connective tissue between legality, legitimacy, and consequence has thinned to the point of translucence.
This is what institutional hollowing actually looks like; not collapse by explosion, but erosion from within. A structure that still stands, still speaks, still performs its ceremonies, but no longer has the internal coherence to carry moral weight.
Unfit, But Carry On
And if you needed another illustration of how thoroughly that structure has emptied out, it arrived in the same news cycle with aNew Year’s Eve health confession tour in which Trump publicly recast his own medical record, insisting he hadn’t received the MRI he repeatedly crowed about but a less revealing CT scan, admitting to taking more aspirin than his doctors advised, and doubling down on unhealthy eating habits that have become cultural shorthand rather than scandal. The moment should have prompted serious questions about judgment, fitness, and candour, but instead, it passed as spectacle: noted, joked about, briefly debated, then absorbed without consequence.
The point is not the details themselves, but what happens to them. Revelation after revelation lands, not with force, but with a dull thud, because there is no longer a solid institutional surface for impact. The system doesn’t resist the truth - it lets it fall straight through.
The same pattern appears again in the constant drip of files relating to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, this week culminating in emails in which Epstein name-checks Trump, reporting that Mar-a-Lago spa employees were drawn into Epstein’s orbit, and renewed scrutiny of a social world that once placed a president alongside a convicted sex offender. Trump’s repeated efforts to delay, deflect, or block further disclosures only sharpen the sense that something unresolved remains buried, and yet, once again, the outcome is familiar: headlines flare, outrage circulates, and then the moment passes without reckoning, not because the information lacks gravity, but because gravity no longer pools where it once did.
Perhaps the most stark demonstration of the pattern was Trump’s military invasion of Venezuala with no authorisation from Congress and without even notifying the Senate Armed Services Committee. Trump just waved his hand and sent the military into a sovereign nation to kidnap it’s leader, like he was ordering another round of Big Macs and fries. In the hours since the illegal invasion, we’ve seen countless leaders issue statements and plenty of hand wringing, but wether anything will be done remains to be seen (though the stars say Trump’s time is up and he’s about to be reined in heavily, so we shall wait and see. If you want my astrological reading on what happens next with Venezuela, click here - I can’t stop now to recap, as you can see, I’m on a roll).
This is why the moment feels so destabilising - not because chaos has erupted, but because authority itself has grown strangely hollow. Power still moves, titles still confer access, offices still function, but meaning no longer keeps pace with them.
Truth has not disappeared. It has migrated.
As institutions lose their capacity to carry moral weight, that weight doesn’t vanish - it redistributes. Into memory, into culture, and into collective judgment. Into the slow, long arc of historical accounting. Into the quiet knowing that outlives any administration or era. Into the frequency of the new world rising beneath our feet.
The burning church, the derailed boulder, the damning testimony, the drip of files, the health denials and the unauthorised invasion - these are not isolated scenes but expressions of the same underlying shift. The structures that once mediated authority, meaning, and consequence can no longer contain what is moving through them. Truth has not gone silent - it has simply moved outside the walls built to house it.
And so we find ourselves in an in-between space: exposure without reckoning, revelation without resolution. The spell has broken, but the stage lights are still on. The set still stands, even as its supports rot beneath it. That tension - between knowing and reckoning - is not a failure of awareness, but the threshold itself.
And it is here, in this uneasy pause between collapse and coherence, that the deeper current begins to take the lead. When the mechanism fails, it creates space - not chaos for its own sake, but room for the unscripted. Room for the improbable. Room for what could never have emerged while everything was locked into its old grooves.
This is the part that’s easy to miss when the headlines are loud with breakdown. Collapse isn’t the whole story - it’s only half of it.
The other half is emergence.
Mayor Mamdani and the Rise of the New
Underneath all the noise of collapse, you can see something blooming quietly, almost absurdly, in the moments that don’t fit the old traditional logic at all, like this week in New York, where Zohran Mamdani - a millennial, Muslim, democratic socialist - was sworn in as mayor. Not in some grand marble chamber of inherited power, but in an underground station, and then again later, in a moment that felt closer to ritual than politics, with Senator Bernie Sanders beside him and Mandy Patinkin singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow with a children’s choir.
If you’d described that scene ten years ago, it would’ve sounded like satire. Or fantasy. Or performance art. Or an impossible dream. A socialist Muslim mayor of New York? Sworn in underground? With a Broadway legend singing a song about dreaming beyond the storm? The system simply wouldn’t have allowed it. The rails were too fixed. The story too tightly policed.
But the scaffolding that once enforced what was “possible” is now loosening. That doesn’t mean the world is suddenly safe or kind - far from it. There is real destruction happening and real grief and real loss as the old world tears itself apart. Old structures are cracking in ways that hurt people on the ground; collapse is not poetic when you’re inside it.
And yet - at the same time - something else is undeniably happening alongside the damage. Space is opening and gaps are appearing where new forms can root. The improbable is slipping through cracks that didn’t exist before. This is what it looks like when the magic that once held the old order together starts to reassign itself.
The same force that once kept everything running on rails is now loosening the bolts, not to create chaos for chaos’ sake, but to interrupt the loop. To break the spell of inevitability. To allow for outcomes that could never emerge inside a closed system.
The boulder coming off its track doesn’t mean the whole structure is doomed. It means the choreography is failing, and that failure creates choice. And in the spaces where the machinery falters, something green stands a chance of pushing up through the cracks.
Unexpected leaders.
Unlikely coalitions.
Moments of tenderness inside systems built on hardness.
Songs where speeches used to be.
Human voices where scripts once ruled.
This is how new worlds begin - not with clean revolutions, but with strange overlaps. With contradictions that shouldn’t coexist but suddenly do. With moments that feel almost mythic in their improbability.
Yes, things are breaking. But not everything breaking is being lost. Some of it is clearing room. Some of it is making way for futures that would have been unthinkable under the old rules.
And that, quietly, is the other story running beneath the noise right now: not just collapse, but clearance. Not just endings, but openings. Not just rubble, but the first green shoots pressing up through it, stubborn and alive, insisting on a different shape of tomorrow.
Walking in the Footsteps of Peace
While temples burn and institutions hollow out, something else is happening - much quieter, almost easy to miss. While mayoral miracles unfold in the Big Apple, across the United States right now, a small group of Buddhist monks has begun walking, on foot, across the country.
They set out months ago from Texas, heading slowly toward Washington, D.C., moving mile by mile through towns, highways, back roads, and suburbs. No convoy, no stage, and no spectacle - just robes, simple packs, and a steady rhythm of footsteps. They stop where they’re welcomed, sleep where they’re offered shelter, and keep going, some days only walking a few miles, and other days more. The point isn’t distance - it’s presence.
They are not marching or protesting, or chanting slogans or demanding change. They’re not carrying placards or policy demands, or any talking points at all. They aren’t arguing with anyone or trying to convince or convert. They’re not shouting over the noise or competing for attention. They are simply moving, slowly and deliberately, through the body of the country, embodying something that has become strangely radical in our time: steadiness.
This is not a performance. It’s not resistance theatre. It’s not activism in the modern sense but something older and quieter than that - a practice that has surfaced again and again across history, at moments when the world has grown too loud to hear itself and when society has tipped into excess, abstraction, or violence.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese Buddhist monks began long peace walks across Japan and later across Europe and the United States, carrying nothing but a drum and a simple prayer. During the Vietnam War, monks and nuns walked through bombed villages and refugee corridors, practising what Thích Nhất Hạnh called walking meditation - not as symbolism, but as a way to stabilise the human nervous system inside catastrophe.
In Cambodia in the 1990s, after genocide had torn the country apart, monks walked through minefields and shattered villages in annual peace pilgrimages, stitching presence back into places where trust had been obliterated. In other moments, people have walked from San Francisco to Washington, from Auschwitz to Hiroshima, from India to the nuclear capitals of the world - long, slow journeys taken not to argue policy, but to embody another way of being human.
Across cultures and centuries, the pattern has repeated over and over: when systems grow too abstract, too violent, or too disconnected from lived reality, some people stop speaking and start walking, not to oppose power, but to retune the field it operates in.
Because there’s a difference between shouting for peace and actually being peace. Peace isn’t something you can force into existence. You can’t argue your way there by trying to beat the world into calm. For peace to exist, it has to be embodied. It has to live somewhere first.
And so the walk itself becomes the message. The body becomes the teaching. Each step says, “here is another way to be human.” Another rhythm. Another tempo. Another signal. No debating. No persuading. No forcing. Just a nervous system refusing to mirror the agitation around it.
This is what makes these walks quietly disruptive. They don’t fight the system - they step outside its frequency entirely. They don’t try to fix the noise - they withdraw their participation in it. And in doing so, they reveal something we’ve mostly forgotten: coherence doesn’t need to announce itself. It only needs to be lived.
In a culture addicted to volume, speed, and spectacle, stillness becomes subversive. Slowness becomes intelligence. Presence becomes power. And that’s why these walking monks feel like more than symbolism right now. They’re not peddling nostalgia or protest theatre. They’re embodying the early signals of the same shift unfolding everywhere else - the quiet migration from mind-run systems toward embodied coherence.
The monks aren’t trying to save the world. They’re showing what it looks like when you stop trying to control it. They are, quite literally, being the temple. No roof. No altar. No authority. Just breath, body, ground, and a refusal to outsource meaning.
And maybe that’s the point. As the old structures burn or hollow out, as institutions lose their gravitational pull, the sacred doesn’t disappear - it decentralises. It goes mobile. It walks. Not loudly, not urgently, but unmistakably onward.
Letting the Deeper Current Lead
While everything feels uncertain and systems shake themselves apart, it’s tempting to assume that what comes next must be suffering - certainly that’s the messaging that’s being sent across news feeds, and shared by political pundits and many thought leaders alike right now. But this moment we are living through is not punishment, and not chaos for its own sake. We are not walking into guaranteed suffering, but a sorting. A falling away of what was never built on truth or love to begin with, and therefore cannot survive this moment. Wether it’s experienced as suffering or not depends on how hard we cling, and how deeply we are anchored.
Some things we’ve relied on will weaken or dissolve in the months and years ahead, not because we’ve failed, but because they were never meant to carry us forever. Many of us adapted to structures that quietly harmed us even as they sustained us, and we learned to live inside arrangements that numbed, constrained, or diminished us, and we called that stability. Letting go of them can feel like loss or even withdrawal, but that discomfort is not punishment. It’s the body and soul reclaiming circulation.
This passage is not forcing us to suffer our way forward.
It’s simply asking us to realign.
If your life is rooted in truth and love, this coming season will not feel like collapse. It will feel like clarification. It will feel like being gently but firmly guided back into coherence. There are people who will move through this period largely untouched by the shaking, not because they are lucky or protected, but because their foundations are already aligned with what’s real.
Where discomfort arises, it’s not a punishment - it’s information. It points to the places where we’re living from fear instead of trust, habit instead of truth, survival instead of connection. It’s a signal saying: something here wants to be replanted in better soil.
None of this is about enduring pain for some abstract “greater good.” It’s about being guided away from what harms us and toward what can actually sustain us. We are not being asked to suffer our way forward. We’re being invited to move, and the only reason it hurts is because many of us have grown used to staying still until staying becomes unbearable.
We don’t have to wait for the pain to push us. We can choose to move earlier, more gently, by loosening our grip and letting ourselves be guided by something quieter and wiser than fear. This is where inner alignment really matters - allowing ourselves the chance to go “out of our minds” and become primarily anchored in the truth of our hearts.
A Mind Led By the Soul
The mind is not the enemy - we’re not intended to avoid it or try to operate outside of it. The mind is the apparatus through which our soul experiences this reality. It’s a vital tool, but it was never meant to lead alone. The mind is finite, wired for protection, alert to threat, always scanning for danger. Left in charge, it tightens, and controls, and braces, not because it’s bad, but because it’s scared.
The heart and the soul, on the other hand, are not afraid of time or loss because they are not bound by either. They know continuity. They know belonging. They know how to move without forcing and when they are allowed to lead, the mind can finally relax into its proper role of translating, organising, and supporting.
This is the balance we’re being invited back into now - not mind versus heart, but mind powered by heart. Thought guided by feeling. Intelligence guided by wisdom. Action guided by resonance.
That’s why this moment isn’t asking us to shut down our thinking or abandon reason - it’s simply asking us to soften it. To let it be informed by something deeper and to allow stillness, intuition, and felt truth to take the wheel, while the mind learns to trust the ride.
This is also why practices that work on both levels matter so much right now - why words alone aren’t always enough, and why sound, rhythm, breath, and resonance really matter. They speak directly to the body and the soul at the same time. They calm the nervous system while opening perception. They restore coherence where fragmentation has ruled.
It’s why I write each day in the Daily Lighthouse, and then allow those words to be set to music in The Resonance Room - because the words soothe the mind, while the frequency of the music speak to the soul, activating both at once. That’s they synergy this moment is calling for - feeling-powered thinking, heart-guided thought, the soul finally leading the mind.
What’s unfolding is not a dark destiny.
It’s a course correction.
A recalibration.
A return to balance.
Some structures will fall. Some identities will loosen. Some certainties will dissolve. But what replaces them isn’t emptiness - it’s alignment. Life reorganising around what can actually hold.
We are not being asked to brace ourselves for suffering.
We are being asked to root ourselves in truth and love.
The more we do that, the gentler this passage becomes. The shaking is not here to break us, but to move us - to free what has been stuck, and to return us to ground that can support what comes next.
This moment invites us to look beyond appearances and listen beneath the noise. To sense what is alive rather than what is loud. To notice where something feels hollow, and where it quietly hums with truth.
We are not being asked to understand everything, but to feel our way forward, and when we do, the world doesn’t suddenly become easy, but it does become legible. More honest and more navigable.
Friends, we are not walking toward our doom, but toward our deliverance.
There is a part of us - older, steadier, and deeply familiar - that knows why we are here now, in this moment of history. A part that has crossed thresholds before, that understands change as passage rather than loss, and that remembers choosing to be here for exactly this turning. We are both a mind navigating a fragile world, and a soul that exists beyond time, and the question is not which is right, but which we allow to lead.
Fear belongs to the mind when it stands alone, but the soul does not share that fear. When the soul leads, perspective widens. Fear loosens. Meaning returns. Peace doesn’t come from pretending nothing is changing, but from anchoring in what cannot be taken away.
The stillness being offered now is not passivity - it’s alignment. It’s the place where the mind stops bracing long enough to hear deeper guidance, and where understanding arrives not as an argument, but as a knowing.
The unease many feel right now is not failure, but an invitation. A signal that something deeper is coming online.
So soften where you can.
Let the noise recede.
Let the heart open.
Let the deeper current speak.
The fullness of who you are is already here, waiting to be remembered, and it knows how to walk this path not in fear, but in trust. It’s time to allow that part of us to rise, for the divine to harmonise with the human, for the inner to power the outer, as we navigate what comes next.
This is the path.
This is the way forward.
It doesn’t look like what came before, and nor should we want it to.
What’s behind us is a world we built because we lost the signal.
What’s ahead is the one we inherit when we acknowledge its return.
See you next Sunday, friends. Until then, have COURAGE, and stay kind, stay fierce, and stay human.
PS: - If you want support letting what’s falling fall, come join me in the Daily Lighthouse. I’ll be there, each day with you, or if you prefer it in an audio listening format, head over to the Resonance Room
You write the most comprehensive coverage of world news available. Thank you.
What an incredible way to start the day! This is everything: “Peace doesn’t come from pretending nothing is changing, but from anchoring in what cannot be taken away.”
True freedom! Thank you so much for sharing your soul.