NOVEMBER 7, 2026 | THE CHAOS DESK | POLITICAL ASTROLOGY

Did you know there is a clinical word for compulsively repeating little mechanical tasks with objects?

Punding.

It can involve collecting things, arranging them over and over, sorting them, assembling and disassembling objects, hiding things, or becoming unusually absorbed in repetitive physical tasks. Like I don’t know…say super gluing gold and gold coins all over the place. Dementia organizations include these kinds of repetitive behaviors among the changes that can appear in some people experiencing cognitive decline.

I would be lying if I said the pattern did not make me stop and look twice because Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have reported that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt once walked into the Oval Office and found the president himself using superglue to attach gold ornamentation to the marble fireplace.

Haberman has also described reporters hearing that Trump had begun gluing gold challenge coins around the Oval Office.

Not directing somebody else to decorate it.

Doing it himself.

Then, on November 2, Trump stood beside the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool during what had been billed as his closing stretch before the midterms. Footage from the event circulated showing him standing with his eyes closed and appearing to sway while Interior Secretary Doug Burgum spoke. Some viewers thought he appeared to be nodding off while standing.

The president has become intensely occupied with objects, beautification projects, gold decoration, monuments, renovation, preservation, and increasingly elaborate attempts to leave his physical fingerprints on Washington.

The Reflecting Pool.

The ballroom.

The triumphal arch.

The Kennedy Center.

The gold Oval Office.

The challenge coins.

The gilded fireplace.

And then, two days after voters stripped Republicans of control of Congress, Trump signed a proclamation attempting to transform the Oval Office, Outer Oval Office, and Cabinet Room into something he says future presidents will not be able to “take down, destroy, touch, or anything else.”

That is where this story gets much more interesting than a bottle of superglue.

Because whether Trump is tired, eccentric, obsessed with decorating, dying slowing on camera or simply Donald Trump being Donald Trump is ultimately beside the point.

What we can see is a president confronting the loss of political control by becoming increasingly preoccupied with permanence.

And the astrology sitting over him right now is almost unnervingly specific about exactly that.

THE MOMENT THIS STOPS BEING ABOUT SUPERGLUE

So on November 5, Trump grabs his Sharpie and declares the Oval Office, the Outer Oval Office, and the Cabinet Room a national monument… as if the Antiquities Act was just waiting for its moment to shine in the West Wing. The White House spins this as a noble gesture to protect these rooms for future generations, promising paperwork, reviews, and a whole lot of bureaucratic throat-clearing before anyone dares to mess with the sacred architecture.

Trump, of course, had a much more cinematic version.

Sitting in a room already dipped in gold leaf, he announced that this move would make it impossible for anyone to ever ‘destroy’ or even seriously tweak the place. He tossed out the idea that future changes might have to run the gauntlet of Congress… because nothing says permanence like a legislative bottleneck.

In reality, the legalese doesn’t actually guarantee the forever-Trump fantasy he’s selling. What it really shows is just how much he WANTS to be permanent… or at least leave something behind that is. It is so telling of his mentality on his mortality.

This is a president who’s spent his second term slapping his dirty orange sticky fingerprints all over the physical presidency… gold everywhere, a ballroom project that eats the East Wing, a triumphal arch straight out of imperial fever dreams, and a cityscape getting the Trump treatment. Every time, he frames it as a gift to ‘future generations.’ Even the White House PR machine is calling it preservation.

And now, right after voters snatched Congress out of his party’s hands, he’s scrambling to wrap the rooms with his own signature in extra layers of protection.

That contradiction is the part I can’t stop staring at… like a gold-plated elephant in the room.

Trump has taken a sledgehammer to what previous presidents left behind… quite literally, in the case of the East Wing and rose garden. But the second someone else might want to change his handiwork, suddenly it’s all about ‘sAcReD pReSeRvAtIoN’🙄. He’s made the biggest changes himself, but now wants a velvet rope around his own renovations.

He gets to play architect with what he’s in, but what about the people who come after him? Are they supposed to think twice before moving a fucking chair?

That’s where the gold stops being the headline.

The real story is his succession.

SCORPIO♏ DOES NOT CARE WHO OWNS THE ROOM TODAY

The shadow is bracing itself against the door, white-knuckled and sweating, pretending it can keep the future out if it just leans hard enough.

Here it’s like the astrology stops being just another political weather report and starts crawling under the skin. Mercury☿ retrograde in Scorpio♏ is squaring off with Trump’s natal Pluto♇ in Leo♌, and Saturn♄ retrograde in Aries♈ is leaning on his natal Mercury☿ in Cancer♋ like a debt collector who knows exactly where you live. Venus♀ retrograde is pacing through Breaking Libra♎, poking at his Cancer♋ placements, while Mars♂ and Jupiter♃ are barreling through Breaking Leo♌, heading straight for his natal Mars♂ at 26°47′ Leo♌. His Ascendant is hanging on at 29°58′ Leo♌, basically clinging to the last rung of the sign. In the Living Sovereign Decan System, that’s a whole lot of pressure building up in the hallway between Breaking and Threshold.

Breaking is the part where the old story starts sweating through its shirt, barely holding itself together as the seams pop. Threshold is what happens when the old form runs out of hallway and the next chapter is banging on the door, refusing to wait any longer.

The shadow’s favorite tricks here are escalation, rigidity, overcompensation, or just yelling louder that nothing’s changed. In Leo♌, all of this gets dragged into the spotlight because Leo♌ is obsessed with public identity, the performance of authority, and making damn sure everyone still recognizes who’s supposed to be the main character.

I keep circling back to the way Trump talks about bodies, health, sickness, strength, cognition, and mortality. On October 23, he posted to Truth Social:

“A healthy person has a thousand dreams. A sick person has only one (to get better)!”

Sure, on its own, it’s just a proverb. But stack it next to the rest of his recent public statements and suddenly it’s part of a weirdly insistent pattern that’s been showing up all over this transit.

Not even a week later, a Reuters reporter asks if Trump skipped Kansas because he was tired. Trump flips it, calls the reporter “sick,” takes a swipe at his looks, and declares himself “perfect.” Fast forward a few days, and Trump’s riffing about rumors he died, bragging about passing cognitive tests, and once again painting his critics as the ones with something wrong upstairs.

This rhetorical loop isn’t just a psychological quirk… it’s astrologically loaded. Mercury☿ retrograde in Scorpio♏ drags the conversation into the underworld: mortality, decay, inheritance, endings, who gets to hold the keys when the music stops. Mercury☿ retrograde keeps poking at the stuff nobody’s finished processing, while the square to natal Pluto♇ in Leo♌ turns it into a tug-of-war between all that shadowy material and a natal chart obsessed with legacy, dominance, and who gets to write the official story.

So what you get is a head-on collision between Threshold symbolism and the language of perfection. “I feel perfect” is a weirdly absolute thing to say when the sky is screaming transition… perfection doesn’t leave any room for aging, limits, vulnerability, or change. It’s a locked box of selfhood, right when the LSDS pressure on Trump’s Leo♌ placements is describing a form that’s running out of room.

His natal Mars♂ is already in Threshold Leo♌, his Ascendant is clinging to the last degree, and Jupiter♃ and Mars♂ are storming through Breaking territory right behind. Everything about visible identity, command, physical presence, aggression, pride, and the myth of personal strength is getting lit up along the same stretch of astrological highway.

Saturn♄ retrograde squaring Trump’s natal Mercury☿ is a whole different flavor of pressure. Saturn♄ is the cosmic timekeeper, the one who eventually calls your bluff and makes you pay the bill. Mercury☿ is all about language and spin, while Cancer♋ circles the wagons around anything that feels exposed. Put them under stress and suddenly the conversation gets defensive… every question about Trump’s stamina or mind gets boomeranged onto someone else. The reporter is sick. The critic is defective. Somebody else’s body becomes the punchline. Trump, of course, is still “perfect.”

Venus♀ retrograde in Breaking Libra♎ drags out the mirror. Libra♎ is all about relationships, comparison, public reflection, and the image we get back from other people. That mirror’s been warping around Trump since the midterms…like a fun house… voters shuffled Congress, Republicans started brawling over leadership, allies got cagey, reporters kept poking at age and health, and suddenly the administration is negotiating from a much shakier perch. Breaking Libra♎ is what happens when the old relationship with the mirror starts to crack. The reflection coming back isn’t something you can stage-manage anymore.

This is why all the symbols swirling around Trump start to look less like random noise and more like a pattern when you lay them over the chart. Gold, monuments, bodies, illness, cognitive tests, death, strength, beauty, weight, preservation, legacy, permanence… they’re all orbiting the same astrological sinkhole. I’m not here to treat any one of these as the smoking gun. What’s more interesting is how stubbornly they circle the real question: what happens when an identity built on dominance, visibility, strength, and permanence keeps running into reminders that time doesn’t care what the identity wants?

That’s the real Pluto♇ problem. Mercury☿ can draft the proclamation, Leo♌ can hog the spotlight, Jupiter♃ can build the monument bigger, Mars♂ can flex harder, Venus♀ can keep bargaining with the mirror…but none of them can erase Threshold. Sooner or later, the degree ticks over, the sign flips, the institution passes to someone else, and the person who ran the show becomes just another name in the history books.

Maybe that’s why the obsession with permanence is blaring like a car alarm right now. The sky is all about transition, but Trump’s language and political theater keep clawing at the idea that nothing ever really changes.

THE WALLS AREN’T THE ONLY THING HE’S TRYING TO HOLD IN PLACE

By the time the midterm results stopped spinning, the whole fight over permanence had already slipped out of the Oval Office and started haunting the hallways. (I see golden ghost of decisions’ past…)

This wasn’t just about what some future president might do to Trump’s gold toilets or his tacky taste in monuments. The real problem was that his political coalition had started shifting under his swollen cankles, and the White House could feel the tremors.

Following Republican losses in both chambers of Congress, the White House Office of Public Liaison sent a message to more than 3,000 conservative organizations reviewing Trump’s accomplishments and promising to resist Democratic efforts to reverse them. At the bottom, highlighted in yellow, was a sentence that had not appeared in earlier communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal: “As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations.” That is giving Godfather energy if I have ever seen it.

Source.

The White House said the language was intended to help maintain unity rather than threaten conservative groups, but its arrival came just as prominent Republicans and conservative organizations were beginning to publicly blame administration policies, including tariffs and the Iran war, for the electoral losses.

The timing here is the real tell… not the bureaucratic wallpaper they pasted over it. Political coalitions only last as long as everyone inside keeps deciding that loyalty is a better bet than independence. But once an election shakes up the math, suddenly the gravitational pull of the center starts to weaken, and people who used to cling to it start eyeing the exits. The administration wasn’t just sending out a memo—it was flashing a yellow light to thousands of groups, letting them know Big Brother was watching just as they were calculating how far they could drift from Trump without getting zapped.

The fracture was not theoretical. Republican officials were already criticizing the administration’s choices, and conservative groups were questioning whether the coalition had abandoned principles they once considered foundational. At the same time, Trump was reportedly telling advisers that he intended to keep raising money through his political operation after the midterms, preserving a vehicle capable of influencing Republican lawmakers and future elections even as his party entered a new congressional reality. In other words, he is rebuilding the war chest, filling the party’s coffers and then dangling the key from around his thick neck.

Axios reported that maintaining that organization would give Trump a way to continue pressuring Republicans who might otherwise begin breaking from him as Democrats prepare to exercise congressional oversight.

This is what succession looks like before anyone actually gets the crown. It starts when the people who used to orbit your power start running the numbers and realize your gravity isn’t guaranteed. Donors start peeking at 2028. Republican officials start tossing blame grenades in public. Advocacy groups suddenly remember all the things they used to hate. Would-be successors start carving out their own constellations instead of basking in your now-radioactive glow. The center’s still there, but everything circling it is quietly mapping escape routes.

This is when I believe control starts looking absolutely desperate. When loyalty is a given, nobody has to say they’re watching. When the coalition is solid, you don’t have to flex just to prove you can still smack down a defector. The more you see the need to monitor, organize, fundraise, pressure, and keep the whole circus together, the more obvious it is that the tent is starting to sag… and the animals are getting restless.

The midterms didn’t just yank congressional power out of Republicans’ grimy little fascist fingers. They dropped a question on Trump’s desk that he can’t wallpaper over with gold trim or fix with another press release.

What do you do when the people who built your political empire start picturing a world that keeps spinning without you in the center?

The real test of succession is beginning inside the chain of command.

Because while the organizations around Trump were being reminded that someone was watching, the person controlling access to Trump himself was about to change.

If you’re reading this as a free subscriber and you’ve been hanging around the edges of Cosmic Chaos, consider coming all the way inside.

The reporting, source digging, political astrology, election tracking, and ridiculous number of hours I spend following these threads are funded directly by readers. There is no corporate newsroom behind me and no advertiser deciding which stories are worth chasing. Paid subscriptions are what give me the freedom to keep following the chaos wherever it actually leads.

If this work helps you understand what is happening beneath the headlines, you can become a paid subscriber here:

Come help me keep the lights on while we watch this next chapter unfold together.

THE GATEKEEPER CHANGES

Susie Wiles handed in her resignation Thursday night, by Friday, Trump had already fast-tracked her exit and announced Stephen Miller as the new White House chief of staff, effective Monday, November 9. Trump did the usual routine, praising Wiles for a “great job” and promising she’d land somewhere in his political machine. But CBS News reported the real story: her resignation was fallout from the Republican midterm losses, and she’d actually planned to stick around through the lame-duck session. Trump had other plans.

This isn’t just a game of musical chairs…Wiles and Miller are two entirely different species when it comes to managing Trump’s power. Wiles made her name by trying to impose order on a circus that’s allergic to it. She ran the 2024 campaign, broke the red glass ceiling as the first woman chief of staff, and somehow managed to be one of the only people who could occasionally keep Trump from lighting his own hair on fire. In actuality, the reporting says she pushed back against some of the very policies now getting blamed for the GOP’s midterm faceplant…think Iran war, think hardline immigration crackdowns.

Trump’s response to losing Congress? Not to find another grown-up to keep the wheels on the magic fascism bus going round and round, but to hand the keys to Stephen Miller, the guy who’s never met a form of torture he didn’t LOVE.

Miller’s rancid, mouthbreathing breath is all over the administration’s most hardline immigration schemes…higher arrest quotas, more deportations, even floating the idea of military muscle at the border and poking holes in habeas corpus for detainees. Let’s just say that Miller was already knee-deep in the policies Democrats are itching to drag into the spotlight once they take the gavel.

The chief of staff is the bouncer, the filter, the person who decides which voices get through and which ones get left outside in the cold. Miller stepping into that role means Trump’s most ideologically loaded adviser is now running the gate…right as the administration is about to get hit with Democratic subpoenas, investigations, legislative roadblocks, and a Congress that’s no longer taking orders.

Fascinating…

It’s like instead of giving Heimdall the key, you just gave it to Joseph Gerbals instead…

Putting Miller in charge could mean the White House leans even harder on executive action for Trump’s last two years. That’s not just a footnote…it’s the administration’s answer to losing its grip on Congress. If you can’t control the legislature, you try to work around it. If your allies get unruly, you shrink the circle. If the system pushes back, you put a true believer at the door—someone whose whole brand is about stretching executive power as far as it’ll go.

There’s a pattern here that’s hard to ignore, and I’ve been watching it for years. Wiles was the first woman to sit in this chair, and now, in the middle of a political meltdown, she’s out, and the seat goes to a man whose whole approach is more confrontational by design. I’ve seen this before—women in Trump’s orbit take the heat, absorb the fallout, get blamed for the mess, and then the machinery quietly hands the controls back to the men. Wiles isn’t gone, but she’s no longer the one standing between the Oval Office and the stampede outside.

Screenshot from an articel I wrote in March of this year…I have updated each woman who has left the admin.

The gatekeeper has changed.

And let’s be honest…the new gatekeeper isn’t here to loosen the White House grip on anything.

WHEN REALITY REFUSES TO TAKE ORDERS

Trump’s appetite for control didn’t stop at the rooms of the White House, the cash, the conservative think tanks, or the guy standing outside his bedroom. By Thursday night, he was wrestling with reality itself, trying to bend the meaning of the midterm fallout into something he could use.

The stock market just got its face rearranged. Nasdaq down 5.52 percent, S&P 500 off 4.36 percent, Dow bleeding 1,833 points… tech and chip stocks taking the worst of it. Sure, the election mattered to investors—Democratic wins meant new headaches for AI infrastructure and data centers—but that’s not the whole damn story. The tech sector was already twitchy after some ugly chip earnings. And let’s not forget, markets actually rallied right after the election results landed, which makes Trump’s neat little morality play a lot messier than he wants you to notice.

Trump doesn’t do messy. He wants the world to line up and salute.

He posted that the market had suffered “one of the Worst Days in History” because Democrats won and told Americans their 401(k)s had fallen because of it. Forty-four minutes later, he sharpened the blade and aimed it directly at the electorate, writing that Democrats had a big Tuesday and that voters had “only yourselves to blame!”

That’s what made me stop scrolling. Blaming Democrats is Trump’s default setting. Blaming the voters themselves…that’s a different animal. The electorate had just pulled congressional power away from his party, and within forty-eight hours Trump was basically telling those same people that whatever pain showed up in their retirement accounts was their own damn fault. Political rejection becomes punishment. You picked this, so whatever hurts next is yours to own. Even if the state of the economy is based on HIS actions.

It’s a beautiful psychological trick. When the market goes up, Trump claims it as proof of his economic wizardry, and he did it again on Wednesday when stocks bounced after the election. When the numbers tanked the next day, suddenly it’s not his circus, not his monkeys. The outcome flips, so the author of the outcome flips right along with it.

This highlights the part of the control machine you can’t build out of marble or fill with bloodsucking Stephen Miller clones. It lives in the story. Whoever gets to decide why something happened gets to decide what people think should happen next. Which is why authoritarian instincts are always starving for the narrative. If your mythology depends on never losing, then a defeat can’t just be a defeat. It has to be sabotage, stupidity, betrayal, or punishment from some shadowy enemy.

Mercury☿ retrograde in Scorpio♏ squaring Trump’s natal Pluto♇ in Leo♌ is almost too on-the-nose for this mess. The transit keeps swiping control of the story into the same arena as control of power. Who gets to name the crisis? Who hands out the guilt? Who decides what the election meant? Who gets remembered as the architect of prosperity, and who gets stuck holding the bag when the numbers go south?

Trump even handed us the bridge into the next part of this transit himself. In the same post blaming Democrats for the market losses, he promised that America would soon be “BIGGER AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE.”

And there it is.

Because with Mars♂ and Jupiter♃ stampeding through Breaking Leo♌ toward his natal Mars♂, Trump’s answer to contraction is exactly what the chart would make me watch for: expansion, amplification, bravado, and the insistence that whatever just shrank must now get bigger. Always and forever bigger.

THE VOLUME KNOB IS ABOUT TO BREAK

Mars♂ and Jupiter♃ are CHARGING through Leo♌ like a pair of pyromaniacs doing the tango, but Trump’s got a little surprise waiting for them at the edge of the sign… his natal Mars♂ parked at 26°47′ Leo♌, just itching for company.

Why does this matter? Because natal Mars♂ is the part of the chart that tells you how someone throws a punch, picks a fight, or bulldozes through anything that looks like an obstacle. Trump’s Mars♂ is hanging out in Threshold Leo♌, which means his fight-or-flight button is already jammed halfway down. Now Mars♂ and Jupiter♃ are rolling in from Breaking territory, sweaty and cranking the pressure up to eleven. He’s getting his appetite for action fed and his appetite for blowing that action out of proportion is getting fed too.

Jupiter♃ isn’t some cosmic guru handing out enlightenment. It just blows everything up to IMAX size. Next to Mars♂, that means confidence can outrun common sense, anger gets a press release, and suddenly every petty squabble feels like it belongs in a history book. Leo♌ throws in a craving for applause and a need to look good doing it… so it’s not just about winning. It’s about making the win big enough to erase whatever bruised ego came before.

I feel this distinction matters after an election like this.

A political leader who can actually adapt might see a loss as a message. Maybe the voters are saying no to part of the plan. Maybe it’s time to tweak a few policies. Maybe, just maybe, the administration should try listening before stampeding down the same dead-end road. Trump’s busy supergluing gold filigree to the empty spaces between the other gold filigree on the walls of the Oval Office…he’s not exactly adapting well.

From his current standpoint, this kind of pressure doesn’t reward reflection. It rewards flexing. Resistance gets met with another shove, embarrassment gets a bigger show, criticism gets a fight, and every time the walls close in, the response is to kick them down and pretend that plenty of room remains.

There’s a nasty feedback loop here because Jupiter♃ can puff up Mars♂ way faster than reality can slap it down. Every time aggression works, it just convinces him the next move should be even bigger. Suddenly, every challenge looks like a dare to prove dominance, and every boundary stops being a warning and starts feeling like a personal insult.

And Trump’s natal Mars♂ isn’t just lounging in the middle of Leo♌ waiting for a wake-up call. It’s already tightrope walking at 26°47′, deep in Threshold, with his Ascendant lurking just a few degrees away at 29°58′ Leo♌. The planets are closing in on the part of his chart that controls both his urge to act and the mask he wears for the world.

In my humble opinion, we need to watch the next stretch so closely. The danger is not that Trump suddenly discovers aggression. We have forty years of public evidence for that personality trait.

The danger is scale.

Mars♂ brings the match. Jupiter♃ pours the gasoline. Leo♌ makes sure the whole world gets a front-row seat to the blaze.

And Threshold wants to know what happens when the guy with the match finally notices the room he’s about to torch isn’t the same one he walked into.

DO NOT MISTAKE THRASHING FOR STRENGTH

This is not your cue to spend the next few months doomscrolling the White House feed like you’re waiting for a mushroom cloud to sprout over Pennsylvania Avenue.

That kind of panic attack gives the escalation way too much credit, and honestly, it flatters the spectacle more than it deserves.

Sure, a wounded political animal is still dangerous… sometimes the ugliest moves come out when power is leaking and restraint feels like a sucker’s game.

( I mean, just look at Stephen Miller…he is UGLY!)

But let’s not confuse thrashing for resurrection. Shouting louder doesn’t make you king again. No amount of chest-thumping is going to magic back the congressional power voters just bitch slapped away.

That difference is huge with Mars♂ and Jupiter♃ both flexing in Leo♌ right now. The cosmic temptation is to answer every challenge by going bigger, louder, and more impossible to ignore. If Trump goes for spectacle, revenge, or some cartoonish show of dominance in the coming weeks, let’s call it what it is instead of letting the performance hijack our nervous systems.

The electorate has already changed the conditions around him.

Now the people we just elected have to enforce those conditions.

Congress needs to remember it’s not just a prop in someone else’s reality show. Oversight can’t be another cable-news cosplay. Subpoenas should bite, not just bark. Investigations need fangs. Any attempt to sidestep Congress deserves a legal and legislative brick wall, not a polite shrug. The folks who ran on restoring checks and balances? Time to actually use the power voters handed over, before escalation becomes just another Tuesday.

And we need to lean on them to do it.

Call them. Write them. Haunt their offices. Watch committee assignments and hearings instead of waiting for the next five-alarm headline. Ask your freshly minted representatives what they’re doing about executive overreach while the scheme is still a rumor … because stopping a power grab at the start is a hell of a lot easier than trying to drag it back after six months of everyone pretending it’s just the new normal.

There’s also a kind of psychological magic in refusing to panic.

Trump has built a whole empire on the idea that resistance is pointless … every over-the-top reaction just feeds the myth that he’s the only one who controls the country’s emotional weather. But a president boxed in by an opposition Congress, cracks in his own coalition, legal headaches, a looming succession brawl, and the ticking clock of reality is not standing at the edge of infinite expansion.

He is standing inside limits.

Mars♂ may want to charge them. Jupiter♃ may convince him the wall is smaller than it looks. Leo♌ may demand that everybody watch him hit it.

Our job is not to become hypnotized by the collision.

Our job is to make sure the wall holds.

Stay Stellar-

Your resident Chaos Witch & Astrological Alchemist