Wizard's Weekly Wrap-Up: September 21-27, 2025
Trump Stalled, Netanyahu Emptied the Room, America Teetered: A Week of Cracks and Collapses
This week, the escalator jammed and the empire cracked.
In New York, Trump stalled at the bottom of a golden stairway at the United Nations, as Netanyahu thundered to an empty hall.
In Washington, Trump’s goons chained the Capitol shut to force a shutdown, hiding hunger as the Labor Department buried reports, the USDA killed its food insecurity survey, and SNAP cuts loomed. The Pentagon gagged the press, the DOJ grabbed voter rolls, and Trump’s border czar was caught on FBI tape pocketing a bribe.
In Dallas, a shooter opened fire on an ICE facility, so naturally Trump sent troops to peaceful Portland, while his personal lawyer rushed to indict his enemies after career prosecutors refused, and Pete Hegseth summoned 800 generals to Quantico in a move that rattled allies.
Epstein’s ghost rattled the vaults as Congress released documents linking Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel to Epstein, and showing Elon Musk listed for a trip to Epstein Island. In response to repeated calls for the full Epstein files, Trump released all government records related to…..Amelia Earhart.
Yes, really.
Jimmy Kimmel roared back to record ratings, Trump slapped tariffs to shield Bolsonaro, dangled billions at Milei, raved about Tylenol, autism, and enemies both real and imagined, while up in the heavens, a Manhattan-sized comet lit up the sky like an omen.
Mad kings cracked, tyrants flailed, scaffolding shook, and millions were disappointed when the rapture didn’t happen. It was a week of farce in the foreground, fracture in the background, and collapse looming just offstage.
Once again, I’ve gathered the shards, checked the stars, mapped the fault lines, and tried to make some clarity out of the chaos.
So take a breath.
Let’s make meaning from the madness.
Transmute fear with insight.
Time to 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 Escalator Stalls
In June 2015, Donald Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president, his chart lit with bravado: Mars on his Sun, Jupiter inflating his Moon, Venus fused to Pluto gilding the spectacle. The scene was gaudy, theatrical, and absurd, and Trump was all swagger and shine, carried downward into history on a moving staircase that seemed to usher in his destiny.
This week, ten years later, the escalator betrayed him; as he tried to ride one up to give a speech at the United Nations, the machine jammed as he stepped on to it. He blamed others, as always, but the symbolism couldn’t be missed.
The descent of 2015 worked. The ascent of 2025 did not.
It may look like Trump is all-powerful right now, but the stars are clear - what began with the bravado and inflation of Mars and Jupiter is now stalling with the wounding and exposure of Chiron and Uranus.
When Trump descended in 2015, the country descended with him, but now as he seeks to ascend, the mechanism he once rode to power refuses to lift him up.
His chart makes it clear: this is not a man rising, but a man stranded, exposed, humiliated, and running out of tricks.
What once was a spectacle of arrival is fast becoming a spectacle of decline.
🌍 The Walkout Heard Round the World
Trump wasn’t the only tyrant to stall at the UN this week. After he flailed at the bottom of a broken escalator, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the General Assembly and watched the room empty around him.
Scores of diplomats rose and walked out, a silent vote of no confidence in a man who, only months ago, still commanded fear if not respect. The trigger for the walkout was Australia, the UK, France, Portual, Canada and many other nations this week formally recognizing a Palestinian state - a diplomatic avalanche that Netanyahu could not stop, no matter how many times he thundered about victory in Gaza.
They were taking a stand against the carnage he has overseen: more than 65,000 Palestinians killed since October 2023, entire neighborhoods flattened, and a people deliberately starved into submission. Today, 2.1 million Gazans face acute food shortages, with nearly half a million already pushed into catastrophic hunger and malnutrition. In the bleakest of ironies, between late May and midsummer alone, hundreds of Palestinians were killed simply for trying to reach food - gunned down at aid convoys or distribution sites. The blockade has gutted hospitals, poisoned water systems, and left families trapped between bombs and famine.
This week, the leaders of the world said: ENOUGH.
Astrologically, as the delegates abandoned him, Netanyahu faced a storm in his chart that mirrored the scene: his confidence cracked, his authority pierced, his old story stripped bare. The preacher’s voice dissolved into fog as his words faltered, while the sky itself delivered a shock to his destiny - a humiliation too stark to hide.
What makes it more striking is how fast it has come apart. Five months ago, it was unimaginable that the world would turn on him like this. In April, Netanyahu still projected command; he was welcomed in Budapest with full honors despite an ICC warrant, embraced by Trump at the White House, and touted hostage-deal negotiations as proof of his leverage. Israel’s war footing ensured he was feared, if not embraced, by allies.
Now, his unraveling is accelerating, timed to the stars with chilling precision. The same man who seemed immovable in spring is suddenly brittle, abandoned, and staring down Pluto’s October station and the Full Moon of December - checkpoints that will drag his myth of strength through public collapse.
The lesson is simple: no tyrant is immune to time. The descent can happen fast, and when the spell breaks, it breaks completely. The stars never lie.
The Tyrant of Tel Aviv is not alone. The same alignments that emptied the UN hall for Netanyahu this week are now circling Donald Trump’s chart. Their fates are twinned, their downfalls mirrored.
The stars are explicit: by February, as Saturn and Neptune fuse at the genesis point in Aries, both men - the Brothers Crim - will stand exposed, isolated in the myths they spun and hemmed in by the ruins of their own making, clutching karmic bills they cannot pay as the world walks on without them.
🔻 The Dictator’s Descent
In the final days of their reigns, history’s tyrants often reveal themselves most nakedly. The iron grip slips, the myth crumbles, and what’s left is the madness spilling into the open. The speeches they once used to command awe and obedience become their undoing, exposing them as deluded, desperate, and terrifyingly small.
Nicolae Ceaușescu tried to stage a show of strength in 1989, summoning tens of thousands into Bucharest’s square for one more rally. Cameras rolled as he began his usual tirade about agitators and foreign enemies, but something snapped. The crowd muttered, then booed, then roared him down. The spell was broken on live television. An entire nation watched the moment their dictator realized he no longer had power, only fear.
Muammar Gaddafi’s unraveling was even more grotesque. As Libya burned in 2011, he went on air shrieking about “rats” and promising to hunt his own people “house by house,” insisting the masses still loved him even as half the country had risen against him. Months later, he was dragged through the streets, his prophecy of martyrdom fulfilled, but not in the way he imagined.
Hitler too had retreated into fantasy as the Reich collapsed around him. In his last broadcasts he spoke of Jewish conspiracies and miracle weapons that would turn the war, and barked orders to ghost divisions that no longer existed. By the time the Soviets breached Berlin, he was a man trapped in a bunker of his own mind, shaking, raging, and waiting for the end.
And Saddam Hussein, cornered in 2003, appeared on television in full military regalia, puffed up with claims of victories that hadn’t happened, praising battles his army had never fought. The world watched him declare triumph while his palaces fell one by one.
In each case, the pattern was the same: when power finally slipped, they didn’t soften or step back. They ranted. They lied. They bared their madness for the world to see. Their speeches, once instruments of control, became monuments to delusion - a final, stunning portrait of leaders unraveling before their people’s eyes.
And now we see this all playing out yet again.
🤯 Mad King’s Bonkers Week
Trump started the week with a rant at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service. Right after Kirk’s widow tearfully offered forgiveness to her husband’s killer, he declared: “Charlie did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”
He went on to terrify every pregnant woman in America with an Oval Office press conference where he rambled alongside RFK Jr about a supposed link between Tylenol and autism. “There’s a rumor and I don’t know if it’s so or not,” he said, pointing to Cuba’s lack of Tylenol and “virtually no autism,” a claim that is manifestly untrue. He drifted into vaccine conspiracies, muttering about vats and horses, before landing on this chilling line: “Ideally, a woman won’t take Tylenol.”
A few days later, he followed up with an insane social media post warning pregnant women in all caps, “DON’T USE TYLENOL UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, DON’T GIVE TYLENOL TO YOUR YOUNG CHILD FOR VIRTUALLY ANY REASON, BREAK UP THE MMR SHOT INTO THREE TOTALLY SEPARATE SHOTS (NOT MIXED!), TAKE CHICKEN P SHOT SEPARATELY, TAKE HEPATITAS B SHOT AT 12 YEARS OLD, OR OLDER, AND, IMPORTANTLY, TAKE VACCINE IN 5 SEPARATE MEDICAL VISITS!”
Trump is not a doctor, and the danger of blasting medical misinformation from the Oval Office to millions is glaring: the MMR vaccine cannot be “broken up” into three separate shots - a fact he might know if he took his health advice from someone other than RFK Jr., who is also neither a doctor nor a scientist.
After two years on the campaign trail promising he’d end the Ukraine war in “24 hours,” this week he also quietly reverted to the very policy he mocked Biden for this week by tweeting support for continued weapons to NATO and betting on Ukraine to push Russia back.
He lurched into conspiracy and fantasy, claiming the FBI had “274 agents” secretly embedded in the January 6 crowd, accused his own appointee Christopher Wray of lying, and then tried to rewrite history by blaming Chris Christie for recommending him in the first place.
He posted a cartoon of himself firing Fed chair Jerome Powell for refusing to slash interest rates fast enough, then declared he was sending “all necessary Troops” to defend “war ravaged Portland,” authorizing “Full Force, if necessary” to protect “any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa.”
But there is no war in Portland - nothing close to the battlefield Trump describes. In the very same week, the only ICE facility under attack was in Dallas, Texas, where a rooftop gunman ambushed a detainee transport van, killing one and critically wounding two others before taking his own life. You might expect Trump to send aid to a Republican-run state reeling from real bloodshed, but instead his fury was aimed at Democrat-led Portland, where Senator Ron Wyden filmed himself outside the empty ICE gates Trump claimed were under siege and told the president bluntly: “We don’t need you here. Stay the hell out of our city.”
At the UN General Assembly in New York, Trump raved about broken escalators and a malfunctioning teleprompter - both his team’s fault - before launching into a fantasy speech where he claimed to have ended seven “unendable” wars in seven months, rebuilt the “greatest economy in the history of the world…again,” and brought in $17 trillion in investment while Biden had “barely scraped $1 trillion.” He mocked renewables as a “green scam,” sneered at London’s Muslim mayor, demanded a Nobel Peace Prize, and even interrupted his foreign policy rant to joke that Melania would’ve fallen on the UN escalator if she weren’t in such “great shape.”
Following the spectacle, one senior diplomat texted a journalist in disbelief: “This man is stark, raving mad. Do Americans not see how embarrassing this is?”
They do. His approval rating is sinking fast. A Reuters/Ipsos survey found just 41% approve of his job performance and 58% disapprove - a net –17 rating, down six points since he took office. That’s a three-point decline since early September and a full six-point slide in approval since he began his term.
Representative Alexandria Ocazio Cortez laid it bare this week, saying, “Donald Trump is less popular than he has ever been. He is underwater on virtually every issue. If you oppose and are disgusted by what this administration is doing, you are in the company of a majority of Americans. You are not alone.”
This is what the end has looked like for many authoritarians, as the echo of insanity spilled out into public view. The UN speech had the shape of a final act - the grand rhetoric, the hunger for admiration, the petty accusations, the endless blame, the refusal to look in the mirror. Less policy, more prophecy - the words of a man losing the story he’s been telling himself.
This is not the stance of a winner. It’s the cornered tyrant, unraveling in real time. And the sky agrees: we are approaching his breaking point, when the mask splits wide. By early next year, Trump’s myth of strength collapses for good.
History has written this chapter before - Ceaușescu, Gaddafi, Saddam, Hitler. Their last words weren’t legacies but epitaphs, monuments to delusion. Now Trump joins that line - remembered not for power but for the madness that marks his end, as he rages and rambles.
Trump isn’t just seizing power, he’s scrambling to cling to it. Every rant, every purge, every show of force is less about expanding his reach and more about patching the cracks. He knows the walls are closing in. He feels the story slipping away. What looks like dominance is really desperation - the empty roar of a man who can rise no further, determined to take us all down with him.
🔪 Enemies at the Guillotine
Trump isn’t going quietly into the night. He’s thrashing like a wounded animal, sowing chaos on his way down, strutting like an unstoppable king while trampling two centuries of precedent.
A small man with a big ego, Trump has never tolerated pushback. That’s why his second administration is stocked with unqualified loyalists who do his bidding without question. He doesn’t care about governance; he cares about obedience. When he boasts that he ended seven wars - with no evidence he did - he expects everyone around him to nod along. And this time, they are.
His first administration was different. Men like James Comey, John Bolton, James Mattis, Jeff Sessions, and John Kelly told him no - sometimes quietly, sometimes spectacularly. According to author Michael Wolff, Trump once asked during his first term, “Under what circumstances can I have someone killed?” and behaved like a man who believed the question had an answer. When his fantasies met resistance, he erupted like a spoiled child. They blocked his demands, walked away rather than obeyed, and he never forgave them.
That resentment has hardened into a mission. This White House has been purged of independent voices, stocked with courtiers and enforcers, and Trump is using them to settle scores.
First, his FBI raided the home of John Bolton. Then he demanded prosecutions of Adam Schiff, who led his first impeachment, and Letitia James, who gutted his business empire. One by one, he is dragging old foes into courtrooms, and this week, he went for James Comey - the former FBI Director who once helped deliver him the presidency but later refused to bend the knee.
After Trump fired him in 2017, Comey documented Trump’s requests to shut down the Michael Flynn investigation, leaked the memo to a friend and calling Trump “ego driven” and “like a mafia don.” Trump branded him a traitor and has been plotting revenge ever since. Prosecutors in Trump’s first Justice Department and Special Counsel John Durham both declined to charge Comey, but that’s no problem for Trump now, with the Justice Department now bent to his will.
This week, he tweeted what amounted to a private directive to his Attorney General Pam Bondi, urging her to “investigate his enemies” - basically Nixon tweeting the Watergate tapes.
He pressured the Eastern District of Virginia until its chief prosecutor resigned, clearing the way for him to install Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer with no prosecutorial experience, as U.S. Attorney. On the campaign trail she was a prop in his “hottest legal team” joke.
Within days Halligan rushed a case against Comey to a grand jury before the statute of limitations expired. The office’s career prosecutors had warned against it, but a sparse two-count indictment was filed anyway: making a false statement and obstructing a congressional proceeding. It accuses Comey of lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020 when he denied authorizing anonymous FBI sources in certain news reports, and of “corruptly endeavoring to influence” the Senate’s inquiry.
“JUSTICE IN AMERICA! One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey,” Trump posted online.
But the prosecution of James Comey is not justice - it’s vengeance. It’s a warning shot to anyone who ever dared stand in Trump’s way. He isn’t hiding it anymore, and his message is simple: if he isn’t stopped, he can do anything to anyone. That’s life in Donald Trump’s America.
But Comey’s indictment is not victory, it’s an omen. His fall is Act One in a wider collapse: the man who midwifed Trump’s rise, cut down for defiance, now paraded as Exhibit A in America’s unraveling institutions. History doesn’t move in straight lines; it loops back, exhumes the buried, and turns men into symbols. And with every strike at his enemies, Trump draws the blade across his own throat.
The skies have one message for the president: Tick, tock, Trump. Tick, tock.
🤐 Muzzle the Critics
As Trump tries to outrun his fate, he’s not just going after enemies, he’s at war with the American people too, desperate to shut them up, lest they say out loud that the King has no clothes and is rapidly losing his mind.
After his chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, managed to successful intimidate Disney into pulling Trump’s arch enemy Jimmy Kimmel off the air last week, Kimmel returned triumphantly this week to the highest ratings of his career and nearly 26 million views across YouTube and social platforms. It was testament to the power of the people - thousands of people rushing to cancel their Disney Plus subscriptions spoke louder than any physical protest could. Trump was furious, tweeting, “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled!”
In the past few weeks, he’s declared open war on free speech, telling reporters in the Oval Office that covering the administration negatively is “really illegal” and promising to revoke press credentials for any journalists who gathers information, even unclassified information, that the Pentagon has not expressly authorized for release.
This week, after a special election in Arizona elected Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva, who will provide the final signature on a discharge petition to demand a floor vote in the House over releasing all the government files on convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Republican stooges have been scrambling to delay her oath, bending the Congress calendar and playing parliamentary games to keep her pen off the paper. But if she signs, the vault cracks open, and Trump knows it.
The secrets are already spilling out - after a month with two eclipses there was no chance buried things would stay hidden.
This week House Democrats cracked open Epstein’s schedules, and out tumbled names like Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and Peter Thiel. Whether the meetings happened or not almost doesn’t matter - the spectacle of their names in black and white is enough to shake the palace walls. And with Trump’s own name scrawled through those files like graffiti, he knows the vault isn’t just creaking open; it’s about to blow. His attempt to assuage the public by this week releasing all government files pertaining to Amelia Earhart - the aviator who disappeared in 1937 - did little to distract voters hungry for truth.
It’s not those files Americans want to see, Donald.
Republicans know what’s at stake, which is why they’re stalling. Speaker Mike Johnson has already yanked the House schedule, declaring there will be no session until after September 30th - conveniently past the deadline to keep the government funded, as it runs out of money that very night.
By refusing to gavel in, they’re running out the clock on two fronts at once: blocking Adelita Grijalva from being sworn in to sign the Epstein petition, and forcing Democrats into a corner on the budget.
It’s brinkmanship as strategy - starve the government, stall the vote, smother the truth. And the skies say clearly: it’s going to blow up in their faces.
💣 Shutdown as Weapon
Government shutdowns aren’t new. Since the late 1970s, Washington has stumbled into plenty of them - some just a few days, others stretching into weeks. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich stared each other down for 21 days. Then came Donald Trump’s own record-breaker: a 35-day freeze in 2018–2019 that left 800,000 federal workers without pay and airports on the brink of chaos.
But those shutdowns were about budgets. This one looming now is all about power.
Back in March, Democrats agreed to extend funding to keep the lights on until now, thinking that they were buying breathing room, but instead, they were walking into a trap, because now if they vote to fund the government again, they’re funding Trump’s cuts, cruelty, and the health care sabotage buried in the Republican budget. If they refuse, the government shuts down on September 30, which also means cuts, cruelty, and chaos.
At the center of this trap is healthcare. In July, Republicans stripped out subsidies that help 4.2 million Americans afford coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Take away those subsidies, and premiums rise for everyone. It’s not just the poor who lose; it’s anyone with insurance. Democrats are saying no - restore the subsidies or no deal, but Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, has other plans.
Vought’s not just looking to save a buck. A Christian nationalist and an architect of Project 2025, he believes this is a “post-constitutional moment,” a chance to gut the modern federal government. He’s threatened not just to furlough workers in a shutdown, but to fire them outright - permanently slashing agencies he sees as illegitimate. Courts would challenge it, but the threat itself reveals the goal: destroy the administrative state, strip away protections, and replace it with raw executive power.
Trump, meanwhile, is adding fuel. He just announced massive new tariffs set to kick in October 1 - 100% on pharmaceuticals, 50% on cabinets, 30% on furniture, 25% on “Heavy (Big!) Trucks.” Courts have ruled he can’t just do this alone, but he’s daring anyone to stop him. Chaos is the weapon.
And the chaos isn’t confined to U.S. borders. This week Trump slapped Brazil with tariffs to shield his disgraced ally Jair Bolsonaro, sending a message to Brasília’s new government that loyalty to Trump comes before international law. At the same time, he dangled a $20 billion bailout for Argentina’s Javier Milei - a dictator-in-waiting whose austerity program has gutted his people - in a blatant attempt to tip their election. The pattern is unmistakable: he is yanking support from traditional democratic allies and funnelling American money and leverage toward fellow strongmen. It’s not foreign policy; it’s a global protection racket, rewarding those who play his game and punishing those who don’t.
Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth hauled 800 generals and admirals to Quantico for an emergency meeting so bizarre it rattled allies from London to Tokyo. These aren’t the moves of a strategist; they’re spasms of a regime lashing outward, projecting power abroad as the scaffolding at home cracks.
And behind all that noise, the numbers went dark. The Labor Department postponed its consumer report, the USDA killed its annual food insecurity survey, and SNAP cuts loomed without oversight. It’s a classic strongman move: if the data disappears, the suffering doesn’t count. A shutdown doesn’t just stop paychecks - it blinds the nation to its own wounds.
Democrats, unusually, aren’t flinching. Hakeem Jeffries called Vought a “malignant political hack.” Chuck Schumer said Trump has been firing workers “since day one - not to govern, but to scare.” They know that caving now means surrendering healthcare for millions.
So here we are, just days away from a shutdown. On one side, a faction that dreams of dragging America back to the 1920s, when government was weak and cruel. On the other, those fighting to preserve the messy, modern system that at least tries to keep planes in the air, medicines affordable, and schools open.
This isn’t a budget fight. It’s a hostage crisis - with the government itself tied to the chair.
☄ The Omen in the Sky
While unprecedented events are unfolding daily, something equally unprecedented is hurtling towards us in the heavens. A comet from another solar system - 3I/ATLAS - only the third object in recorded history to arrive from beyond our realm.
Yep, as if things weren’t crazy enough, now a massive alien space rock the size of Manhattan is headed our way at 33 miles per second!
Unlike most flimsy comets that wander off course, this one doesn’t flinch. Its gravity anchors it. Its chemistry defies expectation, and strangest of all, it glows from the front, as it has headlights. As if it’s not just drifting but actively lighting the way.
For millennia comets have been read as omens. In ages past, such a visitor would be read as the herald of kings falling and empires cracking. Today, it serves as the same warning.
The comet’s message is stark: the universe is watching. We are not living through politics as usual. We are about to walk through a corridor of collapse, with this interstellar visitor lighting our way toward a hard reset written into the stars.
🌀 The Corridor of Collapse
On September 30, the sky says, the scaffolding shakes. What the headlines will call a “shutdown” is, in truth, the first turn of a larger wheel - the signal that the old ways of governing and controlling no longer hold. It may feel like suffocation at first, but astrologically, it’s the door creaking open.
October opens the wound. Frustrations spike, cracks widen, and Pluto’s direct turn forces what’s been festering into the open. The mask of order slips; what lies beneath is raw and unstable.
Late October delivers the omen. As comet 3I/ATLAS swings closest to the Sun, the sky mirrors the ground: signs, shadows, and fractures converging. It is not random chaos, but a signal of endings that precede revolutions.
December rips the veil. Scandals burst, ghosts resurface, and the spell around Trump begins to break. Epstein’s shadow reappears, carrying revelations even his most loyal can’t explain away. As 3I/ATLAS passes closest to Earth just before Christmas, it looks down on a world where secrets are screaming into daylight.
January brings the quake. The air thickens with Aquarius energy, institutions wobble, and leaders stumble. The illusion of control collapses. The Republican machine falters under its own weight, fire on the surface masking fracture beneath.
And then February - the collapse. An Aquarius eclipse silences the stage for a moment, then Saturn and Neptune fuse at the Genesis Point, 0° Aries. Authority dissolves, illusions evaporate, and history hands us a blank page.
Trump stands exposed, his mask stripped and his shadow cycle dragging into daylight. Vance’s opportunism curdles into scapegoat energy, Miller’s poison narratives dissolve in fog, and Vought’s bluster is unmasked as recklessness. The Republican Party itself collapses under its karmic weight: fiery in the autumn, but hollow by February.
Democrats survive, but not triumphantly - Jeffries carrying the bridge role through endurance, Schumer bowing out, the party inheriting rubble rather than renewal. The United States itself staggers into February’s eclipse and reset: the old scaffolding in ruins, the collective dream rewritten.
This is the Corridor of Collapse. It may not unfold in every detail exactly as described, but this is the flavor of the time ahead: Trump exposed, the Republican edifice crumbling, the old order losing its spell.
The path to the reset is paved with pain. The shutdown will not be brief. It will be a winter of discontent - months of paralysis, scandal, and fracture. By the time the light breaks in February, the old scaffolding will be rubble. Only then can something new be built.
🌅 After the King Falls
Trump doesn’t survive as a dominant force through this corridor, yet his fall is not the end - it’s the trigger. The February eclipse is not calm after the storm; it is the dam breaking.
The cult of one man collapses, its messiah eclipsed and humiliated, but the fire that fed it lingers, scattering into shards. Opportunists circle the ruins, seeing collapse not as tragedy but as raw material. The rage Trump unleashed will still stalk the landscape, waiting for the next reckless hand to seize it.
After the scaffolding collapses with Trump, and chaos pours in, the years that follow will feel less like a republic and more like a cracked mirror.
And the cracked mirror is not just metaphor - it is written in the sky. When Saturn and Neptune meet at 0° Aries in February, they cross America’s foundation line. That is the nation’s root, the ground it stands on. When it shatters, the old scaffolding is gone.
Some will claw for the empty throne, others will tear at the idea of it, while factions twist old slogans into fresh conspiracies. Lawlessness creeps at the edges, and in the middle, factions roar.
This is the Saturn–Neptune age: authority dissolved, illusions gone, a people forced to live without the spell. It will be foggy, frightening, exhausting. But chaos is the forge.
Through the smoke, new voices rise. Communities stitch themselves together. Experiments replace decrees. The strongman’s myth dies, but in its place grows a harder, truer vision - one less naive, less easily seduced.
It will not be clean. It will not be quick. Collapse leads to fracture; fracture to reassembly. The fever breaks, the spell shatters, and through the ruin begins the slow, messy birth of a country more awake, less able to be manipulated, having wrestled with its oldest, deepest wounds.
The curtain falls. The mirror breaks. And in the glittering shards, a new republic awaits.
🕯 Hold the Flame in the Dark
Many right now protect their peace by blocking out the noise. They shut down their news feeds, look away, and tell themselves the world’s cruelty hasn’t reached their street, their table, their children. But history is merciless with bystanders. The fire always spreads.
England thought Hitler was “Europe’s problem” until the Luftwaffe rained fire on London and Big Ben stood in smoke. Americans thought Depression breadlines were for the poor, until banks closed, jobs vanished, and hunger arrived on middle-class doorsteps. The truth is simple: what we ignore eventually finds us, especially under Pluto’s watchful gaze.
That’s why walking this corridor matters. Collapse makes cowards into witnesses, and witnesses into participants. When the headlines become your lived reality - when the power cuts, when the cupboards are bare, when cruelty finally knocks on your own door - the question isn’t whether you read the news. It’s whether you’re anchored in something deeper than denial.
History shows us how to walk the corridor anchored in our hearts. During the Blitz, Londoners turned tube stations into kitchens and sang through the bombings. In Sarajevo’s siege, neighbors baked bread in secret and smuggled books so children could keep learning. After the Depression gutted bank accounts, families stitched clothes from flour sacks and made meals from scraps. What saved them wasn’t comfort, but ingenuity, solidarity, and a refusal to surrender their humanity.
Adversity strips away the nonessentials. It asks us to remember what is essential: kindness, resourcefulness, the ability to sit by a candle and still sing. Tyrants always try to convince us we are helpless, but collapse always proves the opposite: ordinary people adapt, endure, and outlast regimes.
The pain ahead will be real, but so will the awakening. Collapse isn’t only destruction; it’s exposure. It shows us what we ignored, what we excused, and what we are truly made of. And only by walking through it, eyes open, can we reach the other side with hearts intact.
Fear will whisper that you cannot survive this. But fear is usually imagination - a projection of what might happen, not what is happening now. The present moment rarely destroys us. What destroys us is dragging tomorrow’s shadows into today. If we stop conjuring futures to fear, we return to the only thing we can ever live in: now.
So as we step into these months, anchor yourself not in fear but in what cannot be rationed or shut down: generosity, courage, humor, and love. Stock your shelves if you can, but stock your spirit even more. Because the new world will not be built by those who hoard, but by those who keep the fire of the human heart alive when everything else goes dark.
(And if you want support keeping that fire alive, 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)
See you next Sunday - until then, stay kind, stay fierce, and stay human.
Dear Wizard Withwords, I am in shell-shock like so many, numb, despairing as it has felt as if the shadow has only been lengthening its reach. But this morning your page was the first thing to show up on my feed, giving me hope that a benevolent Universe of love and light will not only prevail but that we are moving forward, that through this world conflagration that love and light will only widen, deepen. Thank you.
Epstein, Earhart, both begin with E. Clerical error or assumption that we can’t read? We report, you decide.