Dark Stars Rise Again

(I usually post only once a month, but occasionally there's reason to break that rule. This is an article I wrote for a Swiss online magazine, Spuren, some time before Kamala Harris entered the US presidential race. Events have certainly moved on, but the gist of it is, I think, still relevant.)

A few months ago I indulged in a bit a social media. I posted an image of Donald Trump on Twitter with the caption “Dark Star Sinking?” The occasion was the outcome of his trial for falsifying his business records in order to obscure the fact that he had paid Stormy Daniels, a porn star, “hush money” to keep quiet about their affair, so as not to jeopardise his 2016 presidential election campaign. The court found Trump guilty on all counts. Trump was then campaigning for his bid at a second term, hoping to regain in 2024 the presidential seat that he claimed Joe Biden and others had “stolen” from him in 2020.

As many did, I thought that with his conviction, Trump’s chances of winning the election this November had shrunk. Although it is perfectly legal in the United States for a convicted felon to run for the presidency, one suspects – at least I did - that most people would think twice before voting for one.

The caption in my tweet alluded to my book about Trump and the strange “occult politics” that surrounded his 2016 campaign and first administration. In Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump (2018), I looked at how an odd brew of New Thought “mental science” techniques, “chaos magick,” and far-right political ideas coming from the 20th century Italian esotericist Julius Evola, had combined with the increasingly tenuous distinction between “reality” and “simulation” promoted by “reality TV” and the rise of postmodernism and deconstructionism, to produce a world in which Reality is up for grabs. Trump had managed to grab it 8 years ago, but then it got away. Now he was back and looking to capture it again, and I felt that with his convictions, the odds against him doing that had increased.

I should have known that this was wishful thinking. Trump has a reputation as a “comeback kid.” And although at 78 he is hardly a kid, that he has come back is indisputable. Just a few weeks ago, on 1 July, the heavily conservative American Supreme Court reached a decision that presidents possess “absolute immunity” in the performance of their presidential duties. (One can’t help but wonder just what those duties might have been in the case of Stormy Daniels.) The immediate effect of this was to delay Trump’s sentencing over the hush money convictions until later this year – if at all - and to insure that he would face no subsequent trial for his involvement in the storming of the Capitol by his supporters in 2020, before the November election. But the wider, more far-reaching effect of the Supreme Court’s decision is that it effectively places the president – whoever that might be - beyond the law. Dangerous enough, one might think. But when seen in the context of what a possible second Trump presidency might look like, it could have potentially catastrophic results.

Yet, although the Supreme Court’s decision was a boost for Trump, for millions of his followers, it hardly mattered. Just as they believe that the 2020 election was “stolen” from them, they also believe that all of the legal challenges facing Trump, whatever they are, are politically motivated, engineered by the Democrats or “Deep State” or some other opponent to the rule of Trump, in order to keep him out of office. He is a martyr, enduring calumny on all sides. But they know he is a good man and that, well, he has God on his side.

            Whether it was God, a guardian angel or just chance, the notion that Trump is somehow “protected,” and that he has a divine mission to fulfil got some apparent confirmation during his recent campaign rally in Pennsylvania. On 13 July Trump survived an apparent assassination attempt on his life, turning his head at the precise moment when a bullet fired at him would have struck home. Yet in a world of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” that Trump himself helped inaugurate, it remains unclear what caused the slight wound to Trump’s ear. With admirable aplomb and a professional savvy any publicist would envy, Trump rose from the stage, where he had ducked for cover, his face streaked with blood and his fist striking the air, triumphantly shouting “Fight! Fight!” to his crowd of supporters.

The image of the bloodied Trump rising above the Secret Service agents huddled below him against the backdrop of the American flag went viral almost immediately. I have to say that when I first saw it I couldn’t believe it wasn’t staged. It so resembled the famous photograph by Joe Rosenthal of the Marines raising the American flag at Iwo Jima, during World War II, that I couldn’t believe it hadn’t somehow been orchestrated. It has, of course, become “iconic,” in our contemporary misuse of that sorely mistreated word. Yet we still don’t know much about Trump’s wound or what actually caused it, and the FBI has even suggested that he was hit by shrapnel and not grazed by a bullet.

But again, for Trump’s supporters, those who want to “make America great again,” it is perfectly clear what happened. Someone – the Deep State, the Democrats, maybe even some Republican Against Trump (their acronym alone suggests it) – tried to kill their saviour and they failed. Why? Because he will not be prevented from completing his mission. Some within the close Trump circle have even claimed to have seen an angel just by Trump’s side, who gently nudged him in the right direction, to avoid the bullet (or shrapnel or whatever it might have been) and save his life. (If so, either the angel could save only one life at a time or didn’t consider the life of Corey Comparetore, one of Trump’s supporters, worth saving.) Trump himself has said as much. If the courts can’t stop him and even a bullet can’t, he must be doing something right.

            What might that be?

Earlier I mentioned the “New Thought mental science techniques” that informed Trump’s first attempt at the presidency. The basis of New Thought is the belief that “thoughts are things”, very effective things, and that when pursued with the requisite determination, intensity and will, they can effect changes in reality directly, just by themselves. Trump’s particular brand of New Thought is the “positive thinking” that he learned at the feet of the pastor Norman Vincent Peale, author of the bestselling The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale “”Christianized” what is essentially a magical practice. His “positive thinking” works in three stages: what he calls “prayerize, picturise, and actualise”.

First you fervently pray to the Divine for assistance in obtaining what you want. Then you picture it happening, visualizing it as vividly as possible. Finally, you find it actualised, “made real,” which as I’ve argued in some of my books, is the true work of imagination: making “real,” not “make believe.”

I don’t know how dutifully Trump follows this procedure, but I can say that one of the central themes of “positive thinking” that he has made his own is the idea that “facts don’t matter” and that “attitudes are more important than facts,” a dictum that Peale borrowed from the psychiatrist Karl Menninger. Menninger himself was borrowing from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus who remarked that “It’s not things that upset us, but our judgements about them.” That is, reality isn’t the problem: it’s what we believe about it that is.

That reality has not proved a problem for Trump isn’t difficult to see. With a persistence that in another context might be admirable, he has kept to the same story, focused completely on his goal, and ignored anything that may offer any deviation from his aim. This is not only to win a second term as president, but to effect such changes in the way of life of Americans – and by extension, much of the rest of the world – that many fear that were it to become reality, democracy as we have known it will disappear.

Trump has always had helpers in this pursuit. In 2016 they were the members of the then fashionable but now forgotten Alt-Right who, with Steve Bannon – also gone, but not forgotten – used the internet to disseminate the ideas of Julius Evola, and also to work some postmodern “chaos magick.” This time Trump has made a pact with a different sort of devil, the legions making up the adherents of far right Christian Nationalism. From what I gather about their aims, it rather sounds as if they had read parts of The Handmaid’s Tale and thought, “Hmm. That sounds good…”

Trump has distanced himself from the Heritage Foundations’ Project 2025, a radically conservative refitting of much of the state bureaucracy, which includes extending the powers of the president – already given practical immunity by the Supreme Court – banning the abortion pill as well as pornography, and dismantling the Department of Education. But Trump’s disavowal of any association with Project 2025 smacks of his similar disavowal of the Alt-Right, although they were clear fellow-travellers. Such is the case here too. J D Vance, Trump’s running mate, is backed by  the Heritage Foundation, as well as Elon Musk, one of Trump’s biggest donors. Vance himself is an outspoken advocate of Christian Nationalism. And although he was earlier an equally outspoken critic of Trump, he must have seen the light, somewhere.

Another Vance backer who is also linked to Trump is Russel Vought, who served in Trump’s cabinet during his first term. Vought is president of the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think-tank along the lines of the Heritage Foundation, with a vision equally as radical. Vought and others like him believe that America was founded as a Christian nation and if Trump wins another term, Vought has a plan in place to return the nation to its religious roots. Part of this would include a task force aimed at stopping anti-Christian discrimination and at enforcing a Christian way of life, ideas that Trump himself recently expressed. One expression of such a life, at least for women, would be the duty to produce offspring, a responsibility recently endorsed by Vance.

One of Vought’s more immediately disturbing ideas is that, in the event of protests following Trump’s victory – which among the faithful seems a fait accompli – the Insurrection Act of 1807 would be invoked, in order to quell them post haste. The Insurrection Act would also grant the president extraordinary powers – necessary, of course, during a time of crisis. Along with the immunity granted by the Supreme Court and Project 25’s extension of the president’s powers, this would make Trump – were it to happen – more or less untouchable, and in a position to pretty much do what he wants.

The analogy has become something of a cliché, but one can’t help but think of a certain Enabling Act during a certain European nation’s time of crisis, just short of a century ago, that transformed it from a parliamentary democracy into a totalitarian state, seemingly frictionless. One also remembers that for the good of the Volk, women were encouraged to breed.

Could such a thing happen in America? The disturbing answer is yes. In Dark Star Rising I suggest that with Trump’s election in 2016, the world had entered what astrophysicists call a “singularity,” an event after which everything is different. The Big Bang – if indeed it happened – was a singularity, likewise the black holes looming out there in space. But at least in terms of what we take to be ‘reality’ here on earth, with Trump’s first administration, everything was different. “All things will be possible again,” Ivanka Trump declared when she introduced her father at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Let us hope she wasn’t right.