Wizard's Weekly Wrap-Up: August 24-30, 2025
The Week the Strings Showed: Puppets, Power Grabs, and a Planetary Messenger
This week, the empire was a five-alarm fire, smiling through the sirens and calling it a cookout.
Trump muttered about dictatorships, signed executive orders faster than aides could explain them, and fired a Fed governor for the first time in U.S. history before promptly going missing for most of the week, triggering speculation on the internet that he might actually be dead.
Meanwhile soldiers in D.C. emptied trash and landscaped cherry trees to look busy for the cameras while the White House handed election security to a 2020 conspiracy theorist, banned flag-burning like it was 1984, threatened to rename the Pentagon the “War Department,” and revoked Kamala Harris’ secret service detail on the eve of her book tour.
Courts torched Trump’s tariffs and branded them illegal after they prompted postal services from nations across the globe to stop shipping to the U.S. Gun shots rang out in a Minnesota school, the head of the CDC was fired, and one of Elon’s DOGE goons left a copy of the Social Security database on an unsecure server, exposing millions of Americans to identity theft.
Voters in red states turned on the GOP, with Iowa voters flipping a red seat blue, while Senator Joni Ernst - she of the legendary “Well, we all are going to die” Medicaid moment - decided not to tempt fate, quitting before voters could call time of death on her political career in the midterms. Even Utah joined the rebellion, with a court nuking the GOP’s gerrymandered map and ordering a redraw that could hand Democrats a seat in one of the reddest states in America.
August ended in chaos, distraction, and health rumors that no amount of spray tan or hand make-up could hide; the demolition derby of power running out of road.
But as the sideshow at the seat of American power rages on, something else approaches - silent, steady, unbothered by our noise. An interstellar traveler, older than our solar system itself, is gliding toward us for a once-in-human-history visit. Astronomers call it 3I/ATLAS, the mystics call it a messenger, its plasma tail humming with charged particles, a river of cosmic information cutting across the same orbital plane as every planet in our sky, as if to sign its name on the story unfolding below.
It approaches as September’s eclipses split the heavens and Pluto turns direct in October - a stranger from the deep showing up right as history itself tilts on its axis. Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe it’s a cosmic headline in bright ink. Either way, its timing warrants attention, because this isn’t just astronomy - it’s a choice point. A tuning fork held out to humanity. One frequency belongs to the collapsing world, the other to what’s rising. These coming months will decide which one we choose to live on.
As always, I’ve tracked the signs, read the stars, and sifted through the noise to bring you this week’s story - from collapse to calm, from chaos to cadence, from endings to the edge of becoming.
So take a breath.
Hold your nerve.
It’s time to make meaning from the madness.
To transmute fear with insight.
Let’s go in and dive deep.
**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 King Without a Crown
The cameras snapped like a swarm of flies around the Resolute Desk, the Oval Office shimmering with all the tacky gold trim, as if Versailles and a Vegas casino had a baby and raised it on grievance. Trump sat there in front of a pile of executive orders, the self-styled emperor of the moment, left hand draped over his right, hiding the bruise on the back of his hand that some say is a clear sign he may not be long for this world.
“A lot of people are saying,” he mused, “maybe we’d like a dictator.”
The room froze as the words rang out across America this week, carrying with them the sight of soldiers in the streets, police under federal control, civil servants fired by tweet, and democracy itself shrinking behind the desk where he sat, looking less like a president and more like a king who hadn’t read the job description.
🩸 Day One Dictatorship
It’s not at all clear that there are large scale calls for a dictator in America. Indeed, the only person regularly calling for it seems to be Donald Trump. He’s been synonymous with the monicker for years, ever since 2023 when during a Fox News town hall, he dodged a simple "no" when asked if he'd become a dictator if reelected, and instead said he'd be a dictator only on "Day One" of his second term.
When that day came on January 20, 2025, he got to work immediately signing a raft of executive orders that bypassed the co-equal branches of government and skipped the messy business of legislatures and public debate. Why bother with the democratic speed bumps presidents usually hit when you can just scribble your name on a stack of orders and bend a country to your will?
On his first day back on the job, he unleashed a flood of executive actions reshaping policy across climate, education, crime, and civil rights. He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord, pulled out of the World Health Organization, and ended all federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, just with the stroke of his pen. In the days that followed, he revoked anti-discrimination protections in federal contracting, shifting enforcement to the Labor Department, and banned what he called “radical indoctrination” in K–12 schools, targeting critical race theory and transgender support policies.
But as Trump plowed through the tidal wave of executive orders, he often left it to staffers to explain what he was signing. A White House aide would hand him each order and narrate its contents for the cameras while Trump looked on, grinning, like this was news to him too. At one signing, he even paused mid-ceremony to ask for details about the order - an awkward tell that he hadn’t actually read it himself.
The King Doesn’t Rule the Kingdom
Trump may love the flourish of the signature, but the ones writing the orders - the real architects of this authoritarian machinery - are Stephen Miller and Russell Vought.
Miller is the hardliner behind mass deportations and voting crackdowns; Vought, the Project 2025 zealot dismantling the civil service while rewriting the rules of government itself.
Astrologically, Miller and Vought make the perfect puppet masters. Miller’s chart screams ideologue-enforcer - Mars in Leo on Trump’s own Mars gives him direct sway over the president’s impulses, while Pluto in Scorpio against Vought’s Mars shows the two of them building a shadow power grid together. Miller drives the cruelty; Vought, with his Aries Sun in the 10th and Mars buried in the secretive 12th, engineers the system itself. Trump supplies the signatures and the spectacle, but the cosmic geometry makes clear: they’re the architects, Trump’s the prop.
The content or effects of the executive orders they put in front of him seems to only occasionally concern Trump - his focus seems to be more on lapping up the power his pen wields than actually considering what that power might do.
So Trump plays emperor for the cameras while they build the scaffolding behind him, crafting policies, purges, and power grabs. Neither holds elected office, yet they sit at the helm, using a president consumed with retribution and ego as their willing signatory.
They keep him distracted with pet projects - grand ballrooms at the White House, photo-ops with strongmen, new portraits of himself unveiled on the walls of the White House - while the real operators build the empire behind him.
It all has the eerie echo of Fred Trump Sr. - Donald’s late father - who kept showing up at the office every day even as dementia hollowed him out in later life, shuffling papers while others quietly ran the show. His grandson is on the record saying he sees the same flicker now in Donald - the rambling speeches, the confused asides, the handlers steering him toward signatures while they write the orders.
Trump Sr’s decline was family tragedy; his son’s may yet be the nation’s.
🖊️ Ruled by the Pen
Since returning to power just eight months ago, Trump has signed 196 executive orders, plus 47 memoranda and 81 proclamations - a staggering output in such a short span. For comparison: Joe Biden, in his entire presidency, signed 162 executive orders. Barack Obama managed 276, but that was across eight years, not eight months like Trump, who’s now moving at a rate of almost one executive order signed per day, on average.
Many of these orders read like wish lists from Trump’s shadow cabinet: Miller driving the hardline immigration, anti-DEI, and culture war crusades; Vought engineering the attacks on federal bureaucracy, centralizing executive power, and imposing a Christian nationalist framework.
This week, Trump signed an order targeting cashless bail, the system that allows defendants to avoid jail while they await trial (as Trump himself did) without paying bail. Trump wants that gone, which would effectively mean if you’re rich you can pay your way out of prison, but if you’re broke, no such luck.
Another order demanded flag burning be criminalized. “If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail," Trump declared with a wave of his pen, though flag burning is currently protected under the First Amendment, and he has literally no authority to dictate prison sentences.
Trump also decreed that federal buildings should be designed in “classical and traditional” architectural styles, reviving his long-running gripe against modernist buildings. These are the pressing matters this president attends to, while many Americans can’t afford to buy their groceries.
This week, Trump also declared that for any homicide committed in D.C., federal prosecutors should seek the death penalty, even though D.C. abolished capital punishment in 1981. This was just another step in the effort to tighten the administration’s grip on the capital. Citing a “violent crime wave” - even though Trump’s own Justice Department shows crime at a 30-year low - Trump’s seized control of D.C.’s police, armed the National Guard on city streets, and is threatening to send troops into Baltimore and Chicago next.
It’s hard to imagine any of this coming from Trump himself, a man famously allergic to detail. He craves the spectacle, not the substance - ever the showman, while the real operators pull the strings behind the curtain.
🏛️ A Compliant Congress
Trump openly mused this week about renaming the Department of Defense the War Department, a change that would require an act of Congress, but that’s no problem for Trump. “We’re just going to do it,” he decreed. “I’m sure Congress will just go along.”
And he’s right. The Republican-led Congress have been largely just going along with Trump’s unprecedented tactics all year.
Back in March, congressional Republicans set the stage for Trump’s D.C takeover by freezing federal spending, leaving Washington D.C. $1.1 billion short and forcing hiring freezes and cuts to contracts and city services that made it easier for Trump to insist the city is being poorly taken care of, validating his take-over.
This week, Congress went along further when GOP Rep. Andy Biggs introduced a bill to extend Trump’s D.C. police takeover from the legal 30-day cap to six months, and make that the default for all future “emergencies.”
When Trump moved this week to cancel nearly $5 billion in USAID funding that Congress had already approved, the Republican chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee called it an “attempt to undermine the law”, but no meaningful action was taken to stop it. With limited push back from the co-equal branches of government, Trump just carries on testing the limits of executive power, and daring his own party to stop him.
“I have the right to do anything I want to do,” Trump declared this week. “I’m the president of the United States.”
🎯 Governance by Grenade
What Trump’s doing isn’t methodical - it’s chaotic.
Each executive action drops like a bomb on one target, but the shrapnel hits places unintended, so he lobs another order to fix the mess the first one made, only to trigger another mess. It’s government by whack-a-mole, with real lives caught in the blast zone. The chaos is a clear sign there’s no single agenda here beyond grievance and cruelty. Too many cooks in the kitchen, and a leader who can’t help tripping over his own shoelaces.
Case in point: National Guard troops hauled in from Louisiana and Mississippi for Trump’s imaginary D.C. crime wave have been left with little to do, so this week they were spotted spreading mulch around the cherry trees and hauling trash in the August heat. The White House called it “fighting crime,” but it was really about control, and the only reason soldiers are now playing landscaper is because the administration gutted the National Park Service workforce to justify sending them there in the first place.
But it wasn’t just the National Park Service that got the chop; Trump’s been gutting the civil service broadly ever since he returned to power, playing to decades of Republican rhetoric insisting the federal government is bloated and inefficient (even though the federal workforce when Trump took office was the same size it was in 1969, when the country had a population of 140 million less people than it does now). Now more than 300,000 federal workers are set to be gone by December - the largest single-year purge of civil servants since World War II.
Again, this is hardly the strategic work of Trump himself. He’s being puppeteered by his handlers for the power of his pen.
🪓 The Purge: D.C. Edition
Trump’s administration has moved to fire nearly 90% of the workforce of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - the federal watchdog set up after the 2008 crash to stop banks, lenders, and credit card companies from ripping off ordinary people - taking the cop off the bank beat entirely.
He defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting - a move Trump’s administration insisted was designed to target “bias” at NPR & PBS - but as a result, the CPB can no longer provide public broadcasting stations with severe weather alerts.
The Katrina Declaration, signed by FEMA employees this week, warned that cuts and political interference were leaving the country unable to respond to natural disasters, and many signatories were immediately placed on leave for saying so.
At the CDC, Director Susan Monarez was fired this week after resisting political meddling in vaccine guidelines. Within days, the agency lost its chief medical officer, the head of infectious diseases, the director of immunization, and the public health data chief. One official described Monarez as “hamstrung and sidelined by an authoritarian leader.”
In yet another slap in the face to the American people, a whistleblower revealed this week that a copy of the Social Security database for 300 million Americans was left on an unsecure server by Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” a breach that has left millions of Americans susceptible to identity theft.
It’s all pure chaos - every attempt to “fix” something ends up breaking five more things. It’s like a boat springing a leak and, instead of plugging it, Trump and his handlers drill extra holes to let the water out, only to watch the whole thing sink even faster.
💸 The Great American Price Hike
Since returning to power, Trump’s not just been drilling holes in the boat - he’s been punching holes in the economy too, with executive-order tariffs, slapping duties on nearly every international trading partner as if the pain would somehow land harder overseas than on Americans actually paying them.
These tariffs weren’t debated in Congress or passed into law - they were invented by Trump through emergency powers, bypassing the entire legislative process.
One effect of Trump’s tariffs is that the long-standing global exemption allowing imports worth $800 or less duty-free has been scrapped, prompting postal services in Austria, Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, and Thailand to stop shipping to the U.S. entirely rather than eat the cost when American customers refuse surprise tariffs they assumed other countries were covering. So if you’re waiting on a package from overseas, don’t bother watching the mailbox.
But after months of Trump blustering about tariffing the whole world, a federal appeals court finally slapped a giant neon “STOP” sign on the scheme this week, ruling most of those tariffs illegal, though it left them standing until October 14, giving the administration a last shot at the Supreme Court. If the stay lapses without intervention, the tariffs - or at least Trump’s legal authority for them - could collapse overnight.
October 14 is also the day Pluto, the cosmic enforcer of power and reckoning, stations direct in Aquarius. Courts, markets, and the planets align for a moment of judgment: will the tariffs fall, will the chaos deepen, will the empire crack?
It’s the kind of date history underlines in red ink.
🏭 State Capitalism in a Red Hat
For decades, Republicans swore government should keep its hands off the economy, stay out of people’s lives, and let the free market run free. Trump’s tariffs torched that gospel. Nothing says “limited government” like slapping taxes on every foreign good in sight, cutting Congress out entirely, and then handing Uncle Sam a golden ticket into the boardroom of one of America’s biggest tech companies.
Because this week, Trump turned $11.1 billion in public funds into a 10% U.S. government stake in Intel, crowning Uncle Sam the chipmaker’s single largest shareholder.
The right-wing noise machine barely made a peep. The same folks who painted Obama’s auto bailout as Marxism with a side of gulag are now calling Trump’s move “patriotic,” “bold,” even “visionary.” Apparently government control of private enterprise isn’t socialism if it comes with gold trim and a MAGA hat.
What’s happening here isn’t free-market capitalism. It’s state capitalism in jackboots - a government picking winners, putting taxpayers on the shareholder list, and calling it freedom because the pen signing the deal belongs to Trump. If Bernie Sanders had proposed this, Republicans would have staged prayer circles on Fox News, warning of breadlines.
The hypocrisy isn’t the point, though - it’s the precedent. Today it’s Intel. Tomorrow it could be any company that wants federal money and doesn’t mind Uncle Sam showing up on the shareholder roster. What we’re watching isn’t the death of socialism; it’s the birth of Trumpian corporatism, where the state and the market climb into bed together under the banner of “America First” and hope nobody notices the power grab happening under the sheets.
One of Trump’s favorite enemies - New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani -has long pushed for public ownership of housing, transit, and energy, and for these ideas Trump has call him a “100% Communist Lunatic.” But as Jim Gerghty wrote in the Washington Post this week, “It’s a good thing we have President Donald Trump and his administration to stop the spread of Mamdani’s socialist agenda….Instead of having the government take greater control of private companies the way Mamdani wants, the administration is having the government take greater control of private companies the way Trump wants.”
Somehow, socialism is perfectly fine, but only when Trump does it.
⚔️ Revenge Presidency
Mamdani, like many others, may have been the victim of vicious presidential tweets, but this week Trump transitioned from just attacking his enemies on social media and started going after them in real life, with the FBI raiding the home of his former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
When former Governor Chris Christie criticized the president for weaponizing the DOJ and FBI, Trump fired back on social media, claiming Christie “lied about the dangerous and deadly closure of the George Washington Bridge in order to stay out of prison” and suggesting, “for the sake of JUSTICE, perhaps we should start looking at that very serious situation again? NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!”
The convicted criminal in the White House, who now fancies himself the nation’s top law enforcement officer, also targeted former Vice President Kamala Harris’s safety net this week by canceling the Secret Service detail Biden quietly extended for her. Under federal law, that protection should’ve lasted six months post-office, but Biden gave her another year. Trump cut it back just as she’s about to kick off a national book tour - a reminder that in Trump’s America, even a former leader’s safety can be weaponized.
Within hours, California officials scrambled to fill the gap, with Governor Newsom and the California Highway Patrol moving to provide their own protection, a stunning sign of states stepping in where a vindictive president walks out.
In a speech this week, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz defended his former running mate, saying that Kamala Harris "would have been a fantastic president……and look, we wouldn't wake up every day to a bunch of shit on TV and a bunch of nonsense. We would wake up to an adult with compassion and dignity and leadership doing the work, not a manchild crying about whatever is wrong with him. May his fat ankles find something today. Petty as hell.”
🏴☠️ The Coup in Plain Sight
But perhaps the most startling bomb Trump lobbed this week was when he announced he’d fired Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook - the first time in the Fed’s 112-year history that a president has tried to boot a sitting governor.
The Fed’s entire independence rests on the idea that its board can’t be yanked around by political whims, but Trump claimed vague “mortgage fraud” allegations as his pretext. Cook immediately sued, pointing out that the law only allows removal for cause, and this isn’t it.
Legal scholars, economists, and even some Republicans are warning this is a straight-up authoritarian power grab that could crater financial markets if courts don’t stop it.
But Trump seems to think Americans might like authoritarianism, though he swears he’s not an authoritarian himself. “I’m not a dictator,” he assured Americans this week. “I’m a man with great common sense.”
Still, at a cabinet meeting this week, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer gushed to Trump, “Mr President, I invite you to see your big beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor, because you are really the transformational president of the American worker.” She was talking about a giant banner with Trump’s face plastered down the side of the building - a spectacle critics say looks ripped straight from a North Korean playbook.
Increasingly, Trump’s America isn’t just flirting with authoritarianism - it’s starting to look like the full costume party. Firing a Fed governor for the first time in history, floating the idea Americans might like a dictator, plastering his own face on federal buildings - this isn’t random chaos. It’s a deliberate pile-on of power grabs and provocation, a storm of noise masking a single through-line: dismantle the guardrails before anyone can stop him.
This last month wasn’t just messy. It was a relentless cacophony of noise and distraction, and perhaps for very good reason.
🩺 The Emperor Falters
For all intents and purposes, Trump appears to be deteriorating before our eyes.
The first physical signs were noticed a few months ago when cameras zoomed in on his swollen ankles and discolored hands, and aides sheepishly admitted Trump had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a vascular condition affecting blood flow in the legs. They rushed to call it “benign” and “common,” but it didn’t explain the heavy makeup caked over his knuckles at public events, or why staffers seemed so intent on blocking photographers from close-up shots.
Then there were the cognitive stumbles. Trump has always been a rambler, but lately, speeches have veered into incoherent tangents that even loyal supporters struggled to follow. He’s gone off recently on mindless rants about everything from whales to windmills to grass, and when meeting Putin this month he had trouble walking in a straight line down the red carpet, an incident psychologists later described as a possible neurological red flag when combined with his increasingly scattered remarks.
And for the first time in what feels like forever, Trump vanished from public view this week - three full days MIA with no explanation from the White House. The internet lit up with rumors - everything from a medical emergency to the wild claim he’d died - and when footage emerged of a bloated looking Trump walking slowly to his motorcade on Saturday, further theories spread that it was a double, or that he looked like he’d had an episode, or that he was knocking on heaven’s door, a theory that was given legitimacy when Trump’s leadership PAC blasted a fundraising email opening with “Friend, I want to try and get to Heaven,” and tying donations to his divinely-ordained mission.
While the White House remains silent on the current state of Trump’s health, the sky has plenty to say. Jupiter closing in on Trump’s natal Saturn drags the body into a season of reckoning - this is the transit of limits, reality checks, and the weight of age settling into the frame. At the same time, Chiron’s long square to his Venus keeps pressing on circulation and vitality, a slow-burn strain that doesn’t release overnight. Uranus hammering his Descendant keeps threatening him with sudden shocks - the kind that land without warning and play out in front of cameras, shaking alliances and nerves alike.
Taken together, it’s the chart of a man carrying too much weight, too much stress, and too many years, hurtling toward a breaking point. By the first week of December, Trump arrives at one of the most pressurized window in his chart this year - a cosmic convergence hitting health, stamina, and public image all at once. If there’s a moment when this slow unraveling becomes impossible to hide, that’s the one to watch.
For now though, inside the West Wing, according to reporting from Michael Wolff, staffers are “tired of the health talk” but can’t deny what they see. They joke darkly that Trump might not “slow down” so much as simply “go over,” one day just…..stopping.
The official line is that Trump remains “strong” and “vigorous”, but the evidence is piling up. The man who once prided himself on projecting stamina now looks like someone losing a slow, public battle with time itself.
And if that’s the case, it explains the pace of the last month. The White House looks less like a governing operation and more like a pit crew at Daytona - executive orders slapped on the desk, aides narrating their contents as if for the first time, the president signing as fast as they can feed him paper.
It’s governing by speed-run, as though they know the clock is ticking and they want to get the whole wish list inked before the lights go out.
⏳ When the Spell Breaks
Trump’s health scares aren’t just about one man getting older - they’re about a movement staring at its own expiration date. Conservative strategist Rick Wilson calls it the “MAGA Hunger Games,” a quiet knife fight among loyalists who know the whole show depends on Trump staying upright, and jostling for second position when he keels over.
But the truth no one in the White House wants to say out loud is that MAGA is Trump.
Political scientist Aaron Ross Powell put it bluntly - this is a one-man personality cult. It lives and dies on his charisma, his theatrics, his ability to keep the cameras spinning and the base hypnotized. Once that heartbeat stops, the spell breaks, and they know it.
That’s why the executive orders fly off his desk like a speed-run. They’re milking Trump for every last ounce of political capital while he’s still here, because they know the minute he’s gone, the movement splinters into rival factions.
People hoping for Trump’s demise might want to be careful what they wish for - what comes after Trump isn’t automatic liberation. History shows that when a cult leader dies, the story doesn’t end - it mutates. Sociologists call it the “routinization of charisma”: the founder’s death either collapses the movement, fractures it into rival sects, or sparks a dangerous radicalization in the true-believing core.
Jim Jones’ death ended Jonestown overnight, but Waco didn’t stop new Branch Davidian splinters from forming. Heaven’s Gate imploded in one tragic burst; the Unification Church splintered into warring factions after Sun Myung Moon’s death; and QAnon didn’t fade when “Q” stopped posting - it metastasized across a dozen platforms into influencer-driven mini-cults.
The mass devotion cools, but a smaller, hotter fringe often emerges, untethered from the founder’s control, convinced they must carry the flame no matter how dark it burns. The risk isn’t that MAGA dies with Trump, it’s that without him, the movement loses whatever guardrails his charisma provided, and what’s left goes completely feral.
This week, Vice President JD Vance tried to assure Trump’s supporters that he’s ready to pick up the mantle, saying “If, God forbid, something terrible happens, I can’t think of better on‑the‑job training than what I’ve received over the past 200 days,” but even MAGA diehards admit he doesn’t have the juice to command the same loyalty as Trump. Vance might fancy himself as the David Miscavige of MAGA - a man who could seize the throne and institutionalize the movement after the prophet exits - but Miscavige only kept Scientology alive by turning it into a rigid bureaucracy with lawyers, money, and fear doing the work that L. Ron Hubbard’s charisma once did. MAGA doesn’t have that infrastructure, or that discipline. Vox calls Vance a “paper heir,” and Justia warns he’d get shredded by rival Republicans the second Trump exits the stage.
The equation is simple - no Trump, no spell, and no spell, no MAGA. The string-pullers behind the curtain lose the only thing making their agenda unstoppable: half the country nodding along because the dear leader told them to. Without Trump’s circus-barker charisma holding the tent up, the crowd stops clapping, the knives come out, and the puppeteers find out the hard way that the spell never belonged to them.
And when the spell breaks, what’s left won’t be unity - MAGA will splinter into a thousand pieces. When the movement’s center of gravity vanishes, the elites will turn on each other, and a smaller, hotter fringe will likely turn rabid without a single voice holding them back.
What Democrats may picture as a street party the day Trump keels over, will likely be more of a street fight; when a charismatic leader who’s convinced millions of his followers that the whole system is against them goes down, his followers will not slink off quietly.
They’ll rage. They’ll martyrize. They’ll radicalize. And the spell’s shattering won’t bring the calm after the storm - it will unleash the storm they kept barely contained. No wonder the puppeteers are making the most of the time they have left.
🎭 Smoke, Mirrors, and Mayhem
Besides the urgency to push things through given Trump’s fading health, some say all the chaos this month has also been a distraction - while we’re too busy looking over here, the administration is doing something quietly underhanded over there.
While this week’s chaos was unfolding, Trump quietly handed the keys to America’s election infrastructure to Heather Honey - a conservative activist who helped push his false 2020 fraud claims and tried to overturn the last election. She now holds a top job overseeing election security for the federal government.
Critics say it’s like putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department, a move that shreds what little public trust in our democratic systems remains, but hardly anyone knows it happened because we’re all so busy putting out all the other fires Trump’s started.
Trump’s always been a master of distraction, an expert at controlling the narrative and changing the topic of conversation, but the one topic he has struggled to change and the one he’s been largely unable to distract from is about to rear its ugly head in a very big way in September.
🌪️ September’s Epstein Reckoning
If August was Trump’s speed-run presidency, with executive orders slapped down faster than the ink could dry, then September could be the month the chaos finally meets its reckoning as Congress returns from recess this week with Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost in tow.
House Oversight Chair James Comer has already subpoenaed the DOJ for every Epstein-related document in existence - flight logs, the infamous “birthday book,” internal DOJ memos - and the Department has until September 12 to hand it over. Epstein survivors meet privately with the committee on September 3, followed by public hearings expected mid-month. Whistleblowers from inside the Bureau of Prisons will testify about Epstein’s death, and Senate investigators are reportedly circling fresh offshore banking records tied to Epstein’s network.
The fight over the so-called client list is shaping up to be brutal. Lawmakers are threatening contempt proceedings if the DOJ redacts names, meaning the political blast radius could be enormous if - or when - those names surface. Trump’s handlers know this, which explains August’s frantic pace: get the wish list inked before the subpoenas land and the cameras swing back to Epstein.
If September delivers what it promises - leaks, hearings, whistleblowers, and a fresh round of headlines with Trump’s name parked next to Epstein’s - the White House may soon find itself drowning in a story it can’t control. Every subpoena is a fuse, every document dump another match struck. By month’s end, the chaos at Trump’s desk may look less like strength and more like the panic of a man watching the walls close in.
And the stars agree: September won’t be just politics as usual - it’s exposure season, because that’s what eclipses do, and this coming month has two of them. They rip off the roof. They slam one story shut while flinging the next one wide open. The Full Moon on September 7 lights up Trump’s public life like a camera flash - secrets, documents, testimonies, all in the open. Then the New Moon on September 21 draws a hard line under the month, starting the next chapter with subpoenas still smoking. Eclipses don’t ask permission. They deliver endings and revelations on cosmic schedule, whether the White House likes it or not.
Through the rest of the month of September, Trump’s chart shows Saturn demanding receipts, Uranus promising shocks, Pluto moving in for the kill. Epstein’s legacy chart lights up like a flare, cosmic timing for secrets forced into daylight. By month’s end, the hearings and leaks may look less like routine oversight and more like the start of Trump’s reckoning, written in subpoenas and sealed in headlines he can’t control.
Team Trump may not be reading the stars (then again, who knows?), but they can feel the clock ticking and know which way the wind is blowing. The crackling pace of executive orders - each one harsher, faster, more reckless than the last - isn’t strategy, it’s panic in motion. They know there’s one shot to squeeze every drop out of Trump before the secrets spill or the body quits.
Until then, they’ll ride the Trump train like it’s a runaway, flogging that orange carcass right up to the edge of the cliff.
✊ The Rising Resistance
As the White House scrambled, this week the people raised their voice.
In Iowa, a district Trump won in 2024 told him and his party to pack it up when Democrat Catelin Drey flipped a deep-red state senate seat and smashed the GOP’s supermajority in Des Moines. That win followed a string of earlier special elections this year where Democrats chipped away at Republican dominance - proof that the backlash isn’t a blip; it’s a pattern.
And while Iowa voters were busy toppling Republican dominance at the state level, the news only got worse for the GOP on the federal stage: Senator Joni Ernst confirmed she won’t seek a third term in 2026. Yes, the same Joni Ernst who, back in May, responded to voter fears about Medicaid cuts with the immortal line, “Well, we all are going to die.” The clip went viral, the mock apology (shot in a cemetery, no less) backfired spectacularly, and now Ernst is bowing out before voters can deliver their own “death sentence” to her political career, leaving a wide-open U.S. Senate seat in a state Trump carried just a year ago. Her exit sets off a political free-for-all in Iowa, with Democrats smelling opportunity and Republicans bracing for a brawl that could turn a once-safe seat into one of 2026’s most expensive and closely watched races.
Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson tried selling Trump’s $3.4 trillion “One Big Beautiful Bill” to her own constituents in Cedar Rapids this week, and got a full-throated “no thanks” from voters furious about Medicaid and SNAP cuts buried in the fine print. Trump’s allies keep calling it historic; the people on the ground are calling it highway robbery.
All the while, Trump’s approval is deep underwater, hovering between the high 30s and low 40s depending on the poll. His support among independents is especially damning - a critical warning sign, because without them, there’s no electoral majority. No wonder Republicans have been trying to gerrymander their way to electoral victory in Texas - the polls show they can’t win if they don’t.
But even the gerrymandering plan hit a snag this week when a Utah court tossed the GOP’s gerrymandered congressional map, ordering a redraw that could hand Democrats a real shot at a seat in one of the reddest states in the country. For Republicans, this isn’t just a map fight; it’s the loss of the structural advantages they’ve leaned on for decades.
After months of Trumpworld running the country like a one-man demolition derby, voters, judges, and even some of Trump’s own base are quietly pulling the plug. The era of governing by tantrum may not be over yet, but the resistance to it is definitely rising.
☄️ The Stranger at the Gate
Meanwhile, far from the noise of Washington and the collapsing order of politics, something stranger has been creeping into the conversation this week - not a scandal, not a headline, but a visitor from deep space.
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS - only the third object in recorded history to arrive from beyond our solar system - will sweep into the inner planets this October, gliding along the solar system’s orbital plane for the first and only time in human history.
By October’s end it will slingshot past the Sun; by December, it brushes closest to Earth. Scientists say it poses no threat of impact - it will pass at a distance of about 170 million miles so there’s no danger of collision, but that’s close enough to feel like a message in a bottle thrown across light-years finally washing up at our door.
Since its discovery in July, 3I/ATLAS has been puzzling astronomers. Its chemistry alone raised eyebrows: mostly carbon dioxide, barely any water - the opposite of what most comets are made of. Its tail is unusual too - instead of streaming away from the Sun like a good, obedient comet, this one sometimes points toward it - a comet with bad manners, or at least one with an agenda we don’t understand. And most bizarrely, it glows at the front, a comet lit like a torch leading the way.
Some scientists call it an oddball comet; others, like Harvard’s Avi Loeb, wonder if something this precise and off-script might not be entirely natural. Mystics see it as a messenger carrying codes, frequencies, even a solstice-era awakening.
Experts are staying cautious while the spiritual world leans into symbolism, and the comet itself continues barrelling towards us in from the dark as if the universe had signed its name across the sky exactly when the decade begins to crack open.
Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe it’s a cosmic signature on the page of history. Either way, this next few months the skies aren’t just busy - they’re alive with omens of a world about to change.
🔮 What Lies Ahead: September’s Eclipses & Beyond
We are about to walk into one of the most exciting six month periods the stars have ever laid out for us.
The Pisces Full Moon on September 7 floods the world with light, exposing what’s been hiding in the shadows. The Virgo Solar Eclipse on September 21 doesn’t just turn the page - it rewrites the script entirely, a reset point for governments, institutions, and backroom deals whose choices will echo for years.
Then Pluto stations direct in Aquarius on October 14, the planet of buried power now grinding forward in the sign of rebellion and reinvention. Globally, this is when hidden things rise, when pressure under old systems splits them open.
And two weeks later, as if on cue, 3I/ATLAS swings around the Sun on October 29. Astronomers expect it to flare as the heat ignites its frozen surface - CO₂ jets firing, metals boiling off, dust plumes brightening as it arcs toward Earth. Whether just a rock or something stranger, it races through the spotlight exactly as Pluto forces the reckoning into daylight.
By late November and December, Saturn and Neptune turn direct, clearing the fog. The eclipses will have reshaped the map, Pluto will have torn the cover off buried truths, and now the outer planets themselves hold their breath - Pluto, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus all stall at the very edges of their signs like history leaning forward but waiting for the signal to move.
Then, on December 19, the comet makes its closest pass to Earth. The timing is flawless: as the planets pile at the edge of change, this interstellar torchbearer slips past us like it was written into the choreography from the start.
Two days later, on the December 21 solstice, the hinge of the year swings open - planets, eclipses, and a messenger from beyond the solar system all converging on the same turning point. It doesn’t feel like just another season changing. It feels like the decade itself shifting on its axis.
Then January tightens the screws. The inner planets - Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars - all cross Pluto in Aquarius, activating the future in one relentless wave. Technology, governments, movements, even consciousness itself start running on new circuitry.
Then February seals it. A solar eclipse clears the board, and Saturn joins Neptune at 0° Aries in a conjunction not seen before - the Genesis Portal, the reset button where structure meets spirit, systems meet dreams, endings meet beginnings. The narrative of the decade flips.
Through it all, the comet keeps threading the timeline - from its October flare to its December flyby - as if carrying the year’s upheavals toward some prewritten rendezvous. By the time the solstice cracks open and the January–February resets hit, it will feel less like coincidence and more like the universe sent a messenger ahead to light the fuse.
📡 Time to Change the Channel
For a while now, I’ve been tracking the headlines, watching the news of the world, and holding it up against the map in the sky. As Pluto moved into Aquarius, I knew it would not be quiet, because Pluto breaks things open and rips down what can’t last and makes space for what must come next. The skies foretold it would be loud, and they were right, and I’ve been doing my part to make sense of the noise.
What I didn’t see coming was how much it would cost to stay tuned to that frequency. It’s like trying to play from sheet music while the piano is on fire - your fingers invariably get burned.
As September approaches, with its eclipses and thresholds, it feels like the sky is offering all of us a choice. Not a simple fork in the road, but something deeper. The Pisces Full Moon and the Virgo Solar Eclipse will ring out like tuning forks above the noise, asking us all:
Do we want to stay locked on the frequency of collapse, tuned to every headline and scandal, every thrashing spasm of the old world as it goes down?
Or do we want to turn the dial toward what’s rising - the Pluto reckoning in October, the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS swinging past the Sun and Earth as if carrying a torch from the edge of the galaxy, the solstice doorways and the February Genesis Portal where a whole new era begins?
Do we want to live on the frequency of what is breaking, or the frequency of what is coming alive?
Because it’s hard to hold both. Ones from a dying world, and one from a new world rising. One belongs to what’s leaving, the other belongs to what’s arriving.
The news now is mostly just noise. Everything pouring out of the White House - once the most powerful office in the world - now just sounds like chaos, destruction and collapse, and listening in to it constantly is like pressing your ear to an atomic bomb hoping to hear it without being blasted to smithereens.
The center of gravity has shifted. Where the action used to be is not where the action is going to be. We’re looking for meaning where it once resided, but that ship has sailed, and true meaning now lives elsewhere. The stars predict this is what lies ahead - I wrote about it HERE - a future where we are no longer led by politicians, and over the next few decades something more heart and people centred emerges.
Right now, though, it’s like we’re watching the final season of a TV show that should’ve ended years ago - all the best characters gone, the writers long since quit, the plot running on fumes. Now it’s being ghostwritten by ChatGPT with actors who barely know their lines. It’s all noise and static, canned laughter and padding, and it’s well past time to change the channel.
As the old world thrashes as it falls, it would serve us to tune to the signal coming from what’s being born, more than to what’s being demolished. The headlines will keep demanding our attention, but we get to decide which frequency we live on - the static of chaos, or the signal of what’s coming online.
This week, remember: you get to decide which song you’re going to sing - the dirge of the old world falling, or the anthem of the one being born. You do not have to tune to the collapse, you just have to withstand it. Be the still ground when the old world shakes itself apart.
The world will keep blasting its static, the demolition crew will keep rattling the walls, but the real signal is elsewhere now - in the sky, in the timing, in the way the planets and this unexpected cosmic messenger are choreographing a hinge point in history.
So stand steady and stand true.
Let the noise rise and the brittle things fall if they must.
A new day is dawning, a better world is rising, but the future won’t be built by those who panic at the collapse. It will be built by those who stay rooted when the systems break - clear-eyed, unshaken and ready, with eyes firmly fixed on the sky above, not what’s crumbling on the ground below.
We are here to be the solid ground the next world can rise from.
(And if you want support staying solid, come join me in the Daily Lighthouse. I’ll be there, each day with you.)
See you next Sunday - until then, stay kind, stay fierce, and stay human.
Amazing work, I can only imagine the stress it brings you to deep dive the chaos every week in order to bring all of us the clarity and vision to get thru the next one. I grip your posts like the safety bar on a roller coaster, my fear of the chaos transformed into my awe at how amazing this crazy ride is!
Amazing insight and connections as always Wiz thank you! And the return of my beloved 3I/Atlas really brightened me up 💫☄️