Wizard's Weekly Wrap-Up: September 14-20, 2025
Censorship, Chaos, and a Wannabe King; From Kimmel to Calamity, the Week Democracy Bent
This week, the world spun on a fault line and every crack showed.
Gaza burned, Ukraine bled, and NATO scrambled after Russian jets pierced Estonian skies.
JD Vance took over Charlie Kirk’s podcast with a divisive tirade, while Marco Rubio made plans to revoke visa of people who spoke against his fallen hero. Meanwhile, conspiracy theories spread far and wide about Kirk’s alleged killer, celebrities spoke out at the Emmys, and Robert Redford died.
The Fed cut rates for the first time in years, the dollar sank to 2022 lows, farmers buckled, and billionaires shilled out for a ballroom on the White House lawn. Kash Patel turned the FBI into a circus, Border Czar Tom Homan got sprung taking a bribe from an undercover agent, and the Department of War tried to start one with Venezuella by blasting more boats in the Carribean.
King Charles hosted wannabe King Trump (and Melania…and her hat), while protestors lit up Windsor Castle with Trump’s shadow alongside Epstein’s ghost. The First Amendment bent under Trump’s weight as Jimmy Kimmel was yanked off air and the world cancelled Disney. Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson and Karl Rove all spoke out against the dear leader, and a U.S. attorney quit rather than indict Trump’s rivals on command.
Billion-dollar lawsuits poured from Trump’s pen like fan mail to himself, while he declared criticism of him “illegal” and threatened journalists for asking questions he didn’t like. This was the week the world saw with dazzling clarity exactly who Donald Trump really is.
The stage cracked, the script slipped, and the week wrote itself as theater: fear, farce, fracture and fury, all in the shadow of a solar eclipse.
So, once again, I’ve sifted the rubble and interpreted the stars, 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 Authoritarian Playbook Trump Can’t Stop Reading
He came to power by following a careful playbook.
First he exploited crisis and fear and weaponized grievance, promising his followers strength, unity, and someone to blame. He undermined faith in democracy by using rallies, propaganda, and outright lies to present himself as the only strong leader who could restore the nation’s greatness.
He normalized threats of violence and exploited legal loopholes to gain power, then used crisis, fear and myth to maintain it, crushing dissent and demanding loyalty from all who served at his pleasure.
His opposition were held back through misuse of the law and manipulation of the courts, while his goons were sent into the streets to intimidate citizens, creating chaos so he could look like the only one who could impose order.
Sounds like Trump’s America, right?
But that was actually a description of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.
Dictators don’t improvise - they all follow the same handbook. The Authoritarian Playbook; the one Trump appears to have been following meticulously since the day he returned to power in January this year.
Trump’s first wife, Ivana, once let slip that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. He studied how Hitler worked a crowd, how the lies landed, how grievance glued followers together. Whether he read it cover to cover hardly matters. The lessons are visible every time he steps on stage.
🏛️ Breaking with Tradition: Trump’s Twisted Lineage
Most presidents, when they take office, choose a lineage, and model themselves on the giants who came before.
Barack Obama wrapped himself in the mantle of Abraham Lincoln, Joe Biden came into office in the middle of crisis and consciously invoked Franklin Roosevelt, George W. Bush was Reagan’s heir, and Bill Clinton styled himself as the new JFK.
That’s the American tradition. Presidents find a forefather, step into his shadow, and try to stretch their own silhouette across it.
Trump chose something else.
Where other presidents emulated statesmen, Trump has copied strongmen. His rallies echoed Mussolini’s theater. His propaganda tactics lift straight from Hitler’s playbook. His paranoia and purges resemble Stalin’s. His swagger mimics Saddam’s. His cult of personality echoes Gaddafi’s and Kim Jong Un’s. His hunger for unchecked power mirrors Putin and Xi.
🤡 The Dangerous Buffoon
Just as Trump rose to prominence playing a successful businessman on television - when in reality he was a grifting, fraudulent con artist who declared his company’s bankrupt six times - Trump is now cosplaying the role of president, basing his performance on a raft of dictators.
He’s not actually interested in governing in the interest of the people, but rather on the appearance of governance through dominance, draping himself in the garments of power while ruling in the interests of himself.
He isn’t running a country, he’s running a show. The Oval Office is his stage, the courts his props, the military and ICE his blunt instruments, and the American people his captive audience. Every briefing, every summit, every White House lawn presser screamed over the noise of propeller blades is treated as an episode in the long-running reality series of President Trump, starring Donald the would-be dictator.
Trump styles himself against these authoritarian tyrants, emulating the theater and the cruelty, but lacking the discipline and follow-through. He copies the moves, but clumsily, haphazardly, as if he’s skimming the manual rather than mastering it.
Mussolini’s stirring balcony speeches are answered by Trump’s rambling press conferences, where he wanders off topic to rant about whales, windmills, and Hannibal Lecter. Gaddafi’s imposing uniform of gold-braid and tribal robes are met by Trump’s trademark hair, orange bronzer, oversized suit and MAGA cap. As Saddam’s face once loomed from billboards across Iraq, Trump’s now hangs on government buildings at a reported cost of $16,000 a banner, funded by American tax payers.
Trump wants to be feared like a tyrant, but he reads mostly as an infuriating clown, dangerous and cruel, yet stumbling through the dictator’s playbook without discipline, leaving chaos and damage in his wake.
Families are being torn apart as his cruel scourge on immigrants takes effect. Dissenters are being silenced by his fleet of acolytes and sycophants, armed with their social media accounts and vitriol. Opponents are being hounded by his relentless barrage of frivolous law suits and accusations from his weaponised justice department.
He may stumble through his lines in his role as a would-be king, but the stage blood in his play is real, and the drama is deadly.
👑 The Pretend King Meets the Real One
The contrast couldn’t have been more stark when America’s try-hard king met an actual one this week.
When Trump arrived at Windsor Castle for his second state visit to the United Kingdom, the pageantry was everything you’d expect from Britain: carriage procession, military flypast, the Royal Guard in scarlet and gold. King Charles presided with the weight of centuries behind him, custodian of tradition, monarch by inheritance and duty.
Trump, meanwhile, strained for regality but showed the hollowness beneath the costume, striding well ahead of King Charles as they inspected the Royal Guard, breaking protocol as if he couldn’t bear to play second fiddle. It was a repeat of his 2018 blunder with Queen Elizabeth, when he walked in front of her during the guard inspection. With monarchs, positioning is everything - the crown leads, the guest follows - but Trump couldn’t resist grabbing the spotlight, even if it meant clumsily outpacing the King of England.
Outside Windsor, protesters filled London’s streets, and activists projected an image of Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein onto the walls of Windsor Castle, dragging his shadows into the light. Inside, King Charles smiled, toasted the alliance, and did what monarchs do, which is to remind people of something bigger than the man himself. Trump did what Trump always does and made sure the man himself was the only thing in the room.
At the formal state banquet, he managed to praise King Charles as “very, very special” and called the alliance with Britain “a sacred bond” before launching off script, declaring that under his reign America was now “the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
Where the actual King used ceremony and restraint, Trump mixed pageantry with self-promotion. The real king doesn’t need to prove he’s royal; it’s the wannabe who spends every waking moment trying to convince you he is.
🎭 The Dear Leader’s Last Trick
For many watching, the sight of Trump being feted by royalty this week looked like victory. The first U.S. president ever to receive a second state visit, a convicted criminal dining with a real king - on the surface, it’s easy to read that as triumph.
But beneath the pomp, Trump’s grip is slipping. His approval rating is underwater. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll from early September, just 42% of Americans approve of his job, while 56% disapprove. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll around the same time shows a nearly identical split. Issue by issue, the damage is deeper - only about 30% of Americans think he's handling the cost of living well; just 36% rate his economic leadership positively.
This isn’t a man consolidating power - it’s a man cornered by it, running out of road.
Trump has no real plan, no governing vision - only chaos. He lurches from one self-inflicted disaster to the next, dropping bombs to distract from his last explosion. That can only last so long before the wreckage catches up.
Every strongman knows when the spell is breaking. The crowd turns, the myth starts to fray, and that’s always when the escalation begins. They don’t loosen; they lash out. They don’t retreat; they double down. It’s always the same script, the same finale.
Hitler, cornered and unraveling, hurled his exhausted army into the Ardennes in a last-ditch gamble. Mussolini, with Italy starving, dragged his people into a humiliating invasion of Greece. Saddam Hussein, facing unrest at home, lunged at Iran and later Kuwait, lighting the fuse of his own destruction. Gaddafi, besieged by revolt, vowed to hunt his own citizens “like rats” until the mob dragged him into the dust.
Different continents, different decades, but the same ending: when power slips, dictators don’t soften - they scorch the earth on the way out.
And that’s what Trump is doing right now. Escalating, in mad panic, because he knows the walls are closing in and time is running out. This weekend’s eclipse only sharpens the spotlight. It strips away the spin, exposing every stain.
What we’re watching right now isn’t strength - it’s the late-stage dictator’s death rattle: louder threats, wilder moves, deeper cruelty. It looks like power, but it’s panic. It looks like dominance, but it’s desperation.
The playbook has only one ending. Mussolini in the square. Hitler in the bunker. Saddam in the dirt. Gaddafi in the dust. The mask always slips, the curtain always falls.
And in this eclipse shadow, Trump knows it. That’s why he’s escalating, because he can feel the end coming, and that escalation, more than anything, is the proof that it is.
🩺 Dictator in Decline: The Theater of Denial
Trump’s not just losing his grip on power, but seemingly also on his physical and mental health. Dictators often decline into illness or madness as they’re coming to their end, while their courts of sycophants pretend like nothing is wrong.
In his final years, Generals whispered about Hitler’s mental decline. Hitler’s hands shook uncontrollably from Parkinson’s symptoms, drugged daily by his personal doctor, but publicly everyone had to salute and act as if the Fuhrer was invincible, while he ranted about phantom armies that didn’t exist as Berlin burned. Stalin lay dying on his carpet while his inner circle waited outside, too scared to enter. Mao was wheeled out for photographs long after he could speak.
Trump, with his slurred speeches, swollen ankles and bruised hands caked in makeup, demands the same theater of denial - everyone must clap louder, even as the cracks show.
This week, Trump claimed he’d ended a war between Azerbaijan and Albania - when in reality Azerbaijan’s conflict was with Armenia. He also struggled to pronounce Azerbaijan, pausing before he called it “Aberbaijan” without correction. Trump appeared unable to say the name of one country, unable to remember the name of the other, and unaware that - though a U.S.-brokered peace deal was signed by both countries - the war he bragged about ending has not yet officially ended.
Trump this week promised to slash prescription drug costs “by a thousand percent” - which is mathematically impossible - insisting this fantasy would be a “monumental change in health care” and that tariffs (a tax on Americans) would somehow make other countries pay more so Americans could pay less. It was arithmetic turned inside out and policy untethered from reality - if said by anyone else, it would be described as the ravings of a madman.
When Trump appeared at the September 11 memorial last week, one side of his face was visibly drooping, leading many to speculate he’d had a stroke and is suffering from a serious heart condition, though the White House denies it.
Dr John Gartner on The Daily Beast podcast this week diagnosed Trump as showing clear signs of frontotemporal dementia alongside malignant narcissism, stating that his behavior exemplifies the dangerous blend of a severe personality disorder with cognitive deterioration.
And the skies tell the same story.
Everything in Trump’s chart right now screams 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.
And if Trump somehow manages to hang on past his chart’s tricky transits in December, his chart hits a definitive road block in early 2026.
🖤 The Dictator’s Demise
When dictators fall, history always writes it the same way, and the sky tells the story the same way too. The collapse always comes with four forces:
Pluto strips power away, ripping the illusion of invincibility.
Uranus shocks, rebellion erupts, and the throne cracks.
Saturn brings the wall - authority colliding with its limit.
Neptune dissolves the myth until nothing remains but ruin.
And always, the karmic markers - the Nodes, Chiron - show the reckoning, the wound no tyrant can escape. Together, it’s the geometry of collapse.
All of those planets were making hard angles on the charts of Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam and Gaddafi the day their reigns ended. If any of these men had visited an astrologer in the months before their demise, they would have been told clearly: your time is up.
And if Donald Trump sat across from an astrologer today, he’d hear the very same words.
In February 2026, his chart ignites with the same signature: Pluto drags his shadows to the surface; Uranus destabilizes his very persona; Saturn, pierced by Chiron, shatters his authority as Neptune meets Saturn at the top of America’s chart, dissolving the myth of Trump’s rule. The fog clears, the spell breaks, rebellion jolts awake, and Jupiter charges the nation’s identity with fresh fire.
It’s the same pattern. The same story arc. The strongman thrashes, the people rise, the fever breaks.
The geometry of collapse is coming for America’s wannabe king. Don’t mistake all the noise he and his supporters are making for strength. Almost everything he did in this past week was just bluster, intimidation and cover-up from a flailing man who knows his time is running out, and whose loyalists know it too.
🌾 Bread-bowl Bankruptcies, Bribes & Ballrooms
When dictators run short on legitimacy, they usually squeeze the economy dry. Mussolini bled industry for weapons while Italians starved. Stalin exported grain while Ukrainians withered in famine. Saddam torched orchards and punished landowners he distrusted. Gaddafi funnelled Libya’s oil wealth into his own pockets while ordinary families lived on scraps.
Trump’s version is clumsier but just as cruel. His reckless tariff war has driven rural farmers to the brink.
American farmers this year lost the China soybean market almost overnight - a $12b market gone straight down to zero, thanks to Trump’s tariffs. Cuts to food programs have gutted small producers as well, while Trump’s immigration crackdowns have created worker shortages. By the end of July this year, more farms had gone bankrupt than in all of 2024.
Pressed on Fox News this week about farmers concerns about the tariffs, Trump waved it off: “It’s only because they don’t understand the word tariff.” When told that polling shows 52% of Americans think the economy is worse under his administration - with unemployment at a four-year high and grocery costs surging - he shrugged: “Fox polling, I have to tell you, it’s the worst polling I’ve ever had. I’ve told Rupert Murdoch, go get yourself a new pollster because he stinks.”
A Missouri farmer confronted GOP Representative Mark Alford at a town hall this week, saying “When are you going to stand up for us instead of kissing Trump’s ass on these trade deals?”
While farmers face down bankruptcy and average Americans can’t afford their groceries, work crews in Washington, D.C. this week began cutting down trees around the East Wing of the White House to prepare for Trump’s $200 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom. The ballroom is allegedly being paid for by wealthy donors, and one can only guess what they get in return for their contribution. Critics call it a pay-to-play scheme happening in plain sight.
And that’s hardly the only one. MSNBC reported this week that Border Czar Tom Homan was caught on tape back in 2024 accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover operatives posing as contractors in exchange for promised access to government contracts. An FBI probe was launched, but the moment Trump returned to power, his DOJ quietly shut it down.
And The New York Times this week reported on what appears to be yet another pay-to-play scheme, this one directly benefiting Trump. A $2 billion pledge from a UAE national was allegedly accepted into Trump’s family crypto start up two weeks before his administration green-lit the UAE’s access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most coveted AI chips - the kind everyone from Beijing to Silicon Valley is scrambling to get. While there’s no contract proving one deal bought the other, the timing is raising eyebrows.
It’s the classic dictator trick: starve the people while stuffing your pockets. Trump’s version is to watch farmers go bankrupt in his tariff war while he builds his new White House ballroom and rakes in bitcoin billions.
⚖️ A Play for the Courts
To avoid accountability for their corruption, all dictators use the courts to bend the nation to their will. Trump’s been trying it on, with only some degree of success.
After an appeals court ruled this week that Lisa Cook can remain a Federal Reserve governor after Trump tried to remove her, Trump petitioned the Supreme Court asking for an emergency order to fire her, an unprecedented move that threatens the Fed’s independence and could let him stack the board with loyalists.
At the same time, his administration has been leaning on the Justice Department to prosecute one of his fiercest adversaries, New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a half-billion-dollar fraud judgment against him. In Virginia, U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert resigned this week after his mortgage-fraud probe of James produced no charges but drew relentless pressure from Trump officials to indict her anyway.
Trump’s also using the courts to silence dissent, announcing this week he wants to bring racketeering charges against left-wing groups he’s accused of promoting violence, using a decades-old law once used against the mob. He’s called for a RICO investigation of liberal billionaire George Soros, one of the nation’s biggest funders of Democratic causes and candidates, and suggested RICO charges could be brought against protestors at a restaurant he visited in Washington. “They should be put in jail,” he said.
Trump’s using the courts to intimidate journalists as well, filing a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times this week, flinging accusations that the paper is nothing more than “a full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party.” The filing read less like a legal document and more like a love letter to Trump, praising him as a brilliant politician, entertainer, and entrepreneur, prompting a U.S District Judge to throw the whole thing out days after it was filed, calling it "decidedly improper and impermissible" and reminding Trump that “a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective…..not a protected platform to rage against an adversary."
Where other dictators were strategic in their efforts to overthrow the legal system, Trump’s attempts to cow the courts have been haphazard, and so far the court system has largely managed to stand up to the rogue president.
More than 400 lawsuits are currently winding through the courts challenging many of Trump’s second‐term actions, with the Lawfare litigation tracker showing 28 suits where judges have ruled against the federal government so far this term.
🎖️ Trump’s Military Coup
When authoritarians come to power, one of the first moves they make is to seize control of the nation’s military, turning it into a private guard. Stalin purged thousands of officers to make sure no one in uniform could challenge him. Mussolini built a parallel army of Blackshirts to keep the generals in line. Saddam and Gaddafi stacked their security services with loyalists and mercenaries.
Trump’s attempts to overthrow the military have been far more clumsy, chaotic and costly, whilst also callous and cruel.
He ordered the National Guard to occupy Los Angeles in June without the governor’s invitation, prompting a raft of lawsuits and running up a $100 million bill. Governor Gavin Newsom called it “political theater,” noting that many of the troops were just sitting around with no mission.
When he tried the same stunt in Washington, D.C., soldiers had so little to do they ended up emptying trash cans and tending gardens, and more lawsuits followed. When he threatened to send troops into Chicago, resistance was so fierce that he quietly backed down after advisers warned it could create legal headaches.
Unable to entirely bend the military to his will, Trump settled for a rebrand, signing an executive order renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War. The change could cost billions, with new seals, logos, and letterhead across more than 700,000 facilities worldwide, from napkins to Pentagon keychains.
Seemingly in response to the bad press from all the upheaval, Trump’s newly minted Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, rolled out new Pentagon rules this week requiring journalists to sign pledges agreeing not to publish information unless it has been formally cleared and released by the department. The policy, which threatens loss of press credentials for non-compliance, effectively forces reporters to rely only on officially sanctioned narratives, a move press-freedom groups have condemned as prior restraint.
While the administration may be displeased with reporting on its ham-handed military take-over, Trump has succeeded in turning ICE into his own personal shock force - masked, armed, deputized, and unleashed not against foreign enemies but against American citizens.
This week, officers arrested 11 Democratic elected officials in New York after the officials demanded access to cells used by ICE to detain migrants. Brad Lander, the city comptroller, and Jumaane Williams, the public advocate, were among those arrested.
Masked ICE officials have used tear gas in Illinois, pepper spray on Democratic candidates, and pepper balls at Broadview. Hundreds were arrested in Chicago during “Operation Midway Blitz.” Mass raids were carried out in Los Angeles. Trump’s built a paramilitary out of ICE (and allied forces), using fear and force at street level, weaponizing policy to cow dissent.
But even that has received major pushback.
This week, California passed a new law that prohibits law enforcement, including ICE, from wearing masks while on duty. The new legislation bans law-enforcement from concealing their identities during most operations, and though it will almost certainly be met by challenges in the courts, it is yet another example of push back on Donald Trump’s efforts to bed in authoritarianism in America.
🚤 Gunboats, Ghost Wars, and a Desperate Strongman
When dictators feel cornered, they often reach for a reckless war - a show of strength that usually exposes their weakness. Mussolini sent starving troops into Greece, only to be humiliated. Hitler gambled on the Ardennes in a last-ditch offensive that bled him dry. Putin thought Ukraine would fall in days, and instead has revealed the hollowness of his empire.
Trump’s version is even more absurd: shooting down boats in the Caribbean and edging toward war with Venezuela.
Two weeks ago he bombed what he claimed was a drug-running speedboat, killing 11 people. This week, he bragged of sinking another, killing three more, and even claimed a third strike the military hasn’t confirmed. No trial, no due process - just strike first, sort the bodies later.
Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro blasted the strikes as “criminal attacks” and a violation of sovereignty, insisting Trump’s drug-trafficking claims are fabricated and that at least some victims were civilians.
Even legal hardliner Republicans have balked at this example of Trump’s authoritarian escalation. John Yoo, the Bush-era lawyer infamous for defending torture, cautioned against Trump’s claims of limitless power to kill those he labels terrorists. “There has to be a line between crime and war,” he said. “We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military.”
But this isn’t really about a threat to the country - it’s provocation. Trump is daring Caracas to strike back, and the motive may not only be foreign policy. When Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy visited the Oval Office recently and explained that elections were suspended during wartime, Trump’s instant reply was: “So if we have war here, we can’t have elections?”
These strikes look less like strategy and more like rehearsal. Gunboat diplomacy as cover for an old authoritarian trick: war abroad as the excuse to suspend democracy at home.
Trump may have his eye on next year’s midterms and 2028, but the stars say it won’t be his name on the ballot.
🧬 Science on Trial: The War on Facts
When an authoritarian leader seeks to sway his flock, one of the first things he attacks is science, because facts don’t bend to ideology. Since Trump stood at the podium in 2020 and implied COVID could be cured by ingesting bleach, he’s waged a relentless campaign to erode public trust in evidence, dismantle institutions of knowledge, and replace proof with obedience.
This week, former CDC Director Susan Monarez testified before Congress that she was pushed out after refusing to pre-approve vaccine recommendations no matter the evidence, or to fire career experts without cause, or to greenlight changes to vaccine schedules that had no scientific basis. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, who also resigned in protest, said the agency was being reduced to “rubber stamps.”
On Trump’s watch, the CDC’s expert advisory panel, once a cornerstone of vaccine policy, has been gutted, and this week Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s new handpicked vaccine panel upended decades of public health policy by declining to recommend COVID shots for anyone - not even seniors - leaving vaccination “up to individual choice.” They went further, pushing for stronger warnings about supposed risks, ignoring the billions of safe doses administered worldwide.
Medical groups blasted the decision as reckless and confusing, but confusion is the point: sow distrust, weaken the CDC, and drag science into the partisan mud.
It is the authoritarian playbook dressed in American clothes: purge experts, sideline science, and install loyalists. Where Stalin replaced genetics with pseudoscience, Trump and RFK Jr. now replace medicine with conspiracy. Where Hitler filled labs with ideologues, America’s public health institutions are now staffed by activists who see data as optional.
And like every regime before it, the cost won’t just be measured in broken institutions - it will be measured in lives.
🎪 Kash Patel’s Circus
Every dictator has his attack dog in the justice system. Hitler had the Gestapo, Stalin the NKVD, Mussolini his OVRA. Saddam’s police invented plots to justify purges; Putin’s investigators “lose” evidence when allies are implicated.
Trump’s version is his FBI Director - former podcaster Kash Patel - bumbling through the Charlie Kirk investigation, bungling basic procedure, and blowing up on Capitol Hill when pressed for answers.
From the moment of Kirk’s killing, Patel’s handling of the investigation was riddled with missteps. He raced to social media to declare a suspect “in custody” who was later released, delayed releasing suspect photos, and made erratic public comments.
Most damning, Patel publicly admitted Kirk was his close friend - a glaring conflict of interest that any other FBI Director would have recused himself over. Instead, he leaned into it, closing one briefing with the bizarre send-off, “See you in Valhalla” - a line that jarred Kirk’s evangelical supporters and sounded more like theater for the MAGA base than a tribute to the dead.
Patel’s circus spilled onto Capitol Hill this week when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he faced sharp questioning over his performance in the Kirk investigation, his cuts to the agency and his oversight of the Epstein investigation.
When pressed by Senator John Kennedy about the Epstein case, Patel flatly declared: “There is no credible information - none - that he trafficked to other individuals.” Survivors and advocates erupted, saying Patel’s statement whitewashed years of public testimony naming other powerful figures.
It was a spectacle: the FBI Director trading insults with lawmakers, deflecting questions, and looking more like a partisan attack dog than the nation’s top cop.
Where other regimes forged iron-fisted secret police, Trump has an online influencer turning America’s justice system into a circus.
⚔️ Patriots vs. Traitors: Trump’s Friend–Enemy Game
Dictators survive by redefining who counts as “the people.” Those loyal are patriots; those who dissent become enemies of the state. Hitler cast Jews as traitors conspiring against Germany. Stalin labeled rivals “foreign agents” or “wreckers,” a catch-all justification for purges. Franco painted republicans as “reds” corrupting Spain. In every case, the strategy was the same: collapse political disagreement into existential threat.
Trump has spent years trying to perfect this move. Since his first term, he has insisted America is split into two camps: Republicans - which he defines as those loyal to him - and “Democrats,” a label he slaps on anyone who crosses him. Opposition, in Trump’s worldview, is not legitimate politics - it’s treachery.
That play reached a new crescendo this week. After right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s murder - apparently the act of a lone gunman - Trump rushed to pin it on “Democrats” or simply “THEM.” This week, he escalated by declaring “Antifa,” “a sick, dangerous, radical left disaster” and promised that those funding it would be investigated “in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices.”
But “Antifa” isn’t an organization funded by anyone - there’s no leader, no headquarters, no donors. “Antifa” literally means anti-fascism - not a membership club, not a funded network, just a loose label anyone opposing fascist movements might use. It’s an idea, a banner for grassroots resistance to fascism, which makes Trump’s talk of “designating” or “dismantling” it pure theater.
Legal experts were quick to note there is no legal authority to designate a domestic movement as a terrorist organization. But the law isn’t the point - the labeling is.
Carl Schmitt, the Nazi theorist now enjoying a strange renaissance among MAGA intellectuals, wrote that politics is defined by the friend-enemy distinction. That’s precisely the game Trump is playing: dividing the nation into patriots and traitors, Americans and “Antifa,” friends and enemies.
In the Wall Street Journal this week, Karl Rove - once George W. Bush’s political strategist - rejected the president’s rhetoric. “Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed by ‘them,’” he wrote. “One person did. Using Charlie’s murder to justify retaliation against political rivals is wrong and dangerous. It will further divide and embitter our country. No good thing will come of it.”
But Trump’s allies have rushed to back him. Steven Miller spoke of “uprooting” enemies inside the nation. Vice President J.D. Vance vowed to dismantle liberal institutions he called “terrorist networks.” As guest host of Kirk’s own podcast, he declared that “there can be no unity” with a long list of people who don’t share his views.
Later in the week, Vance went further, saying, “The idea that left-wing violence and right-wing violence in 2025 in America are equal, it’s preposterous,” Vance said. When asked about calls from Democrats to lower the temperature, Vance responded, “If you want to take down the temperature and you’re on the left of center, the first and most important thing you can do is look in the mirror.”
Democrats were quick to point out that no leader on the left has openly celebrated Kirk’s death or said he deserved it - as some on the right did when Minnesota Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman was gunned down earlier this year. No prominent Democrat jeered at Kirk’s murder the way leading right-wing voices mocked the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan offered facts to counteract the fiction, citing multiple studies that showed right-wing extremism was a long standing problem in America, and that “the single biggest day of political violence in our lifetimes was January 6th, 2021, when right-wing extremists attacked the Capitol.”
A 2024 Department of Justice report noted that “since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists,” though according to The Daily Beast, the DOJ removed that report from its website after Kirk’s shooting.
But in a dictatorship, in a country under authoritarian rule, once the dear leader convinces his followers that dissenters are enemies, the leap from words to prosecutions, from prosecutions to violence, becomes a matter of when, not if.
🔇 The Authoritarian Muzzle: Cancel Culture, Dictator-Style
Every authoritarian knows that controlling the narrative means silencing the voices that challenge it. Hitler confiscated radios so Germans couldn’t hear the BBC. Stalin erased writers and artists in the Leningrad Affair. Franco censored plays, music, and newspapers that failed to praise his regime. Pinochet shuttered papers and tortured journalists. Putin today jails reporters and brands dissent “foreign propaganda.”
Trump’s version is more slipshod but born of the same impulse: cancel comedians, muzzle networks, and punish citizens for words he doesn’t like.
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, while Trump blamed Democrats for his killing, Republican leaders have rushed to recast him as a Christian martyr. passing legislation this week designating October 14th a national day of remembrance, trying to paper over his history of racism and misogyny. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reminded Congress this week that Kirk had once argued the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, saying: “His rhetoric and beliefs were ignorant, uneducated and sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans.”
But under Trump’s rule, questioning Kirk’s legacy quickly has become heresy. Educators, service workers, even a pro-sports staffer have been fired simply for posting that “hate begets hate.”
Vice President JD Vance told Fox News, “The First Amendment protects a lot of very ugly speech but if you celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death, you should not be protected from being fired…..maybe you should lose your job or your university should face a loss of funding.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the U.S. would “deny visas to foreign nationals who celebrate or defend the killing of Kirk.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi went further, saying, “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place…..We will absolutely target you, go after you.”
Almost immediately, Bondi’s assertion that citizens could be targeted for hateful words drew outrage from people across the political spectrum. Even Justice Sotomayor indirectly addressed Bondi's comments, saying, "Every time I listen to a lawyer-trained representative saying we should criminalize free speech in some way, I think to myself, that law school failed.”
📺 Late Night, Cancelled by the State
But the authoritarian reflex to decide which words are permissible, and to punish those who cross the line has been used for a century to smother dissent.
When pressed on free speech this week by ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Trump himself sneered: “I’d probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe I’ll come after ABC.”
Trump’s vendetta against ABC has been simmering for months. After anchor George Stephanopoulos misstated that Trump had been found civilly liable for the“rape” rather than the “sexual abuse” of writer E. Jean Carroll, ABC settled by donating $15 million to Trump’s future library plus $1 million in fees. But Trump kept the grudge, particularly against ABC’s most prominent host, Jimmy Kimmel.
When Stephen Colbert’s show was cancelled under political pressure earlier this year, Trump tweeted, “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next.”
In the days after Kirk’s death, while offering sympathy to Kirk’s family, Kimmel used his platform to criticize conservatives for trying to pin the murder on Democrats, noting they were “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
Kimmel also took aim at the president, playing a clip of Trump’s response to a reporter who asked how the president was holding up after Kirk’s death. Trump answered: “I think very good. And by the way right there you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House which is something they’ve been trying to get as you know for about for 150 years and it’s gonna be a beauty.” Kimmel joked that Trump had reached the fourth stage of grief: construction
Almost immediately, FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC’s license, warning on a livestream with influencer Benny Johnson: “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC.”
Nexstar, an ABC affiliate with over thirty stations and a pending $6.2 billion merger requiring FCC approval, quickly announced it would pull Kimmel’s show, citing “strong objections.” Sinclair followed, demanding Kimmel make a public apology and donations to Kirk’s family and Turning Point USA if he wished to have his show reinstated.
Disney executives admitted privately that Kimmel hadn’t crossed any lines, but pulled his show anyway. Benny Johnson celebrated online: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re just getting started.”
But it wasn’t for Charlie. It was for the dear leader, because in this America, wounding the president’s pride has become a fireable offense. Trump said as much himself, telling reporters this week that publishing negative stories about him is “really illegal.”
This is how it always looks: Mussolini shuttered newspapers that mocked him. Stalin executed poets whose verses stung. And now in Washington, comedians vanish from airwaves because they bruised a politician’s ego.
✊ Americans vs. Authoritarianism
For years, partisanship carved the country into hostile tribes, but the uproar over the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel has revealed a different kind of divide: not Democrat versus Republican, but but Americans versus authoritarianism.
Chris Hayes put it bluntly: “This is the most straightforward attack on free speech from state actors I’ve ever seen in my life and it’s not even close.”
Senator Chuck Schumer called for FCC chair Brendan Carr’s resignation: “He is one of the greatest threats to free speech America has ever seen.”
Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner blasted the chilling effect: “The ‘suspending indefinitely’ of Jimmy Kimmel immediately after the Chairman of the FCC’s aggressive yet hollow threatening of the Disney Company is yet another example of out-of-control intimidation…..Maybe the Constitution should have said, ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, except in one’s political or financial self-interest.’”
Minnesotta Governor Tim Walz said, “If you’ve ever wondered how democracy dies, you’re witnessing it. This is North Korea style stuff. And it’s being done because this is a weak, thin-skinned man who’s failing as a president. All of the things he promised are not happening. This is exactly what dictators do. This is a terrible president and a terrible human being.”
Even Barack Obama weighed in: “After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.”
But the backlash isn’t just partisan anymore. In the wake of Trump’s blatant attack on free speech, even old allies are recoiling.
Senator Ted Cruz warned: “If the government gets in the business of saying we don’t like what you, the media, have said, we’re going to ban you from the airwaves…..that will end up bad for conservatives. We should denounce it.”
Tucker Carlson told his viewers: “If they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think…..there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that.”
In most dictatorships, this is the point where silence descends. Hitler’s Gestapo dragged editors to prison, Stalin’s purges silenced even whispers and rarely did the elite push back once the machinery of fear was in motion.
But in America, something different is stirring. Scientists, corporations, strategists, and even conservative media stars are rediscovering their voices, not because they agree on policy, but because they know what happens when speech itself is lost.
Perhaps it was the people who spoke the loudest this week, crashing the cancellation page as they rushed to unsubscribe from Disney Plus. By end of week, Disney had lost $4 billion in market value, as people abandoned the Magic Kingdom in droves over it’s cowardly failure to stand up to authoritarianism.
The partisan lines are blurring, replaced by something more elemental. Call it pushback. Call it conscience. Call it democracy’s last stand. Whatever the name, it sounds a lot like the first three words of the Constitution:
We the People.
🎭 Every Strongman’s Last Act
And that’s how dictators fall - not by choice, not by mercy, but when the people remember their own power. The playbook of fear only works so long as the crowd keeps clapping. When the spell breaks, when soldiers refuse to shoot, when the mob turns on the man they once hailed, the curtain comes crashing down.
Trump’s been following the authoritarian playbook, and once you start down that path, the ending is written. Taking power from the people by force never ends well, in the end.
Mussolini was strung up by his ankles in a Milan square, spat on by the very people who once cheered him. Hitler poisoned himself in a bunker as his empire crumbled overhead, his generals already plotting their own survival. Saddam went into hiding, and was eventually dragged from a hole in the dirt, beard matted, blinking into the cameras of the world that once feared him. Gaddafi was beaten, bloodied, and left to die in the dust, the golden tents of his delusion collapsing into rubble.
Different continents, different decades, but the same ending: isolation, humiliation, collapse. The illusion of invincibility always shatters. The people always turn. The power always runs dry.
And Trump - a dictator’s understudy playing king on a stage built of lies - is marching toward his own finale. The curtain does not stay up forever. The lights dim, the mask slips, and the man who strutted and shouted is revealed as small, broken, finished.
And as his final act approaches, America’s sky is spelling out that same climax.
This weekend’s eclipse lands like a fist on the nation’s throat: Mars grinding against Pluto, Neptune fogging the country’s public face, while the Sun blazes across the national Midheaven. Speech, truth, and power become the battleground. Kimmel’s cancellation, Disney’s collapse, and the battle over who controls the story - all of it mirrors the eclipse geometry. As the nation’s throat is seized, the crack in the illusion widens.
By December, the mask can’t hold. The Sun slams into Uranus, jolting the presidency. Mars opposes America’s own Mars, exhaustion spilling out as conflict backfires. Neptune still clouds the country’s image, but Saturn presses hard against it - illusion colliding with limit, myth colliding with reality. What looked untouchable starts to unravel. The White House can’t spin its way out of shock and exposure. The spell begins to break.
And then comes February 2026 - the Saturn–Neptune reset. Both planets sit opposite America’s Midheaven, dissolving the nation’s old myths while forcing a reckoning with hard reality. Uranus jolts the people awake, while Pluto ignites systemic transformation. Jupiter inflates the Sun, Mars charges Mars: the people surge, chaotic but alive. It won’t be clean, and it won’t be calm, but it will be undeniable - the strongman’s curtain falling as a country remembers its own voice.
That’s the geometry of collapse. The same pattern that marked Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam, and Gaddafi now blazes across America’s sky. Trump may thrash, but the stage is already set. The eclipse cracks it, December unravels it, February resets it.
The spell is ending, and once the crowd remembers its power, no tyrant can hold the stage.
🔥 The Forge of Chaos: What Comes After Trump
The end of Trump will not be the end of the trouble, but the breaking of a dam.
When his spell collapses in 2026, it won’t bring calm - it will rip the cover off years of rot and rage. The fall of the strongman isn’t the healing, it’s the trigger. His downfall leaves a vacuum, and into it will rush chaos and factions.
In the years immediately after, America will feel less like a republic and more like a cracked mirror, with everyone seeing something different in the shards. Some will reach for his throne, others will tear at the very idea of it. The people will rise, not as one voice but as a thousand, shouting over one another in the ruins. Lawlessness will creep at the edges. Trust in the old rules will evaporate.
This is the Saturn–Neptune era: authority washed away, myths dissolving, the nation stumbling through fog. These years will be confusing, dangerous, exhausting, but ultimately clarifying. A people who once lived inside the illusion will be forced to learn to live without it.
And then, slowly, the chaos will become a forge. Uprisings and fractures will not be the end of America, but the messy birth pangs of its next form. Out of rubble, unexpected leaders will rise. Communities will knit together. Experiments will replace decrees. The old myths will die with Trump, but in its place a harder, truer, less naive vision will begin to take root.
It will not be clean. It will not be quick. The next five years will be a reckoning, a battle for the soul of the republic.
Collapse comes first. Faction follows. But then, through the cracks, the reassembly begins. The fever breaks, the spell shatters, and from the smoke of ruin, a country more awake, less easily seduced, and ready to be remade starts to grow.
❤️ Hold on to your hearts
The greatest danger of a dictator isn’t just what he does while in power. It’s what he does to our hearts.
He wants to make us small like him. He wants to make us bitter, divided, filled with venom. If he can teach us to hate, then he wins twice - once by power, and once by poisoning the very thing that outlasts him.
That’s where the survivors matter.
Viktor Frankl walked out of Auschwitz with nothing but his insight that the last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s own attitude. Even when everything else is stripped away, you can still decide not to become like your oppressor.
Eva Mozes Kor chose forgiveness - not because the Nazis deserved it, but because she refused to let them live in her forever.
Edith Eger says hatred keeps you chained to the camp; love is the only thing that sets you free.
And Elie Wiesel, who lost his family in the flames, warned us that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference - a deadened heart that no longer feels at all.
These are not stories of weakness. They are stories of the fiercest kind of strength. The strength to walk through hell and refuse to become it.
So yes, dictators rise and fall, but survivors rise too. Their lesson is not just that tyranny collapses - it always does - but that the human heart can outlast the tyrant if we refuse to let it close.
That is our work now: to hold onto an open heart even in the face of cruelty. To rage, yes, to resist, yes, but not to curdle into hate.
Because hate is just fear in a costume. When someone says “I hate this person,” what they’re really saying is “I fear them.” We like to believe hate carries power, like a fire we can throw at someone else, but the fuel underneath is fear - fear of being hurt, of being exposed, of losing control. Hate isn’t courage. It’s cowardice with a megaphone.
The bravest thing isn’t to hate; it’s to face what frightens you without letting it curdle into poison. To pause long enough for your courage to catch up to your fear. To hold the line with love - sometimes soft, sometimes fierce, but never cowardly.
Leaning toward love doesn’t mean liking everyone. It means refusing to let fear decide who you are.
It is fear that has filled our world with hate - millions of frightened people puffing up and running scared. What we need now is not more hate disguised as power, but the courage to stare fear in the face, call it by its name, and burn it clean with love.
If the idea of that makes you angry, maybe you’re not mad at all. Maybe you’re just afraid. And the antidote for that is not more rage. The only medicine is love.
So this week, don’t join the war of closed hearts. Be the one who keeps love alive in a world terrified of it. That is how the new world will be midwifed, by those brave enough to stay open.
(And if you want support staying open, come join me in the Daily Lighthouse. I’ll be there, each day with you. And if you’re looking for a meditation to honor today’s solar eclipse, this one HERE is outstanding)
See you next Sunday - until then, stay kind, stay fierce, and stay human.
I really appreciate you putting this together every week. I’m always stunned at the volume of what’s happened in just one week. This will be really important information to keep —to show a week by week process of what happened to our country as you scribe this amazing work. And thank you for the length of it. In days, where everybody is shortening things up to gripes and groans, I appreciate being able to stretch my brain and work my eyes and stay present for a single voice. I think we’re losing that skill set. I don’t have a lot of extra cash at the moment to support substack writers, but you’re definitely one that is more than worth it. I look forward to your Sunday wrap up.🙏🏼
Man this was a lot but in a good way! I swear your weekly wrap ups and your posts help keep me in perspective and more grounded in this craziness happening. Thank you for what you do🥰