“The mistake was letting the war happen. If Biden were competent. And if Zelenskyy were competent — and I don’t know that he is, we had a rough session with this guy over here – you don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.” Donald Trump to El Salvador President Bukele: 14 April

“Homegrowns are next… The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.” On whether his deportation plan includes American citizens: “Yeah, that includes them—you think they’re a special type of people or something?” Donald Trump to President Bukele: 14 April

[China, the Supreme Court and Harvard] “are Trump’s most formidable foes. If he doesn’t understand this and instead succumbs to the urges of his power-crazed lackeys, the Trump regime’s days will in effect be over before it even completes the first hundred of them.” Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labour, professor and political commentator. April 14

A LANDMARK RULING was made on Monday in the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court. According to the unanimous verdict of five judges, the definition of a woman is based on biological sex. Lord Hodge, Deputy President of the Supreme Court, announced the ruling, adding this was “not a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of the other.” However, it must have felt like a body blow to the transgender community who may still retain rights under the equal-rights act, but are plunged into uncertainty as to how to navigate the new ruling.

Here is a picture of that moment.

“Anyone sounding the all-clear on tariffs, or Trump economic policy in general, should be kept away from sharp objects and banned from operating heavy machinery,” Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate.

“This is the worst self-inflicted wound that I have ever seen an administration impose on a well-functioning economy,” Janet Yellen, former United States secretary of the treasury from 2021 to 2025.

“What has happened since last Thursday is hard to fathom. Based on an ever-shifting series of rationales, characterized by an embarrassing methodology, and punctuated with an extraordinary arrogance toward the country’s constitutional order, the Trump administration has alienated our global allies, discombobulated our domestic businesses, decimated our capital markets, and increased the likelihood of serious recession…

… No free man wants to be at the mercy of a king.” National Review, 8 April

ASTROLOGY DOES NOT cause the weather. I’ve said this on numerous occasions, but while there may be no causal link between the prevailing alignments and a deadly fleet of tornadoes, there is a certain synchronicity about the storms that have devastated south and Midwest America causing the governors of Tennessee and Kentucky to declare states of emergency, and the tsunami that has been taking place in the American stock market, and indeed markets across the world.

Last Saturday, millions of people took to the streets of cities across America to protest the Trump administration’s policies. The “Hands Off” demonstrators were protesting a variety of grievances from immigration raids and cuts to federal government to foreign policy.

On Tuesday, President Zelensky announced that two Chinese nationals had been captured on Ukrainian soil. The following day he revealed that Ukrainian intelligence had identified 155 Chinese citizens fighting alongside Russian forces. A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs referred to the claims as “groundless”.

On Thursday, five senior members of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, the last remaining major opposition party, reported that they had been warned by Chinese officials that they will face serious consequences, including arrest, should they fail to disband the party.

Yesterday, the US Supreme Court upheld a lower court judge’s order requiring the Trump administration to facilitate the return to the United States of a Salvadorian man whom the government have conceded was deported in error to El Salvador. Abrego Garcia is married to a US citizen with whom he is raising a US citizen child in addition to his wife’s two children from a prior relationship. He had never been charged with or convicted of any crime.

If there is a common denominator to be found in these various events it revolves around the plight of so many fighting for rights in a climate that favours might-is-right, but, of course, they have all been taking place under the cosmic umbrella of an applying Mars-Pluto opposition intersected by Chiron, and the forthcoming full moon.

 I’M NOT GOING to give a blow-by-blow account of the journey from 2 April’s Liberation Day to today, but in a nutshell, President Trump, despite the precipitous plunge of markets across the world, first doubled down on his swingeing tariffs, then performed a pivot declaring that they would remain on hold for ninety days. Since that announcement, world markets have risen, although American stock and bond markets tumbled further before they headed upward. However, it is the opinion of many economists that the damage is done.

Since 2 April, $10 trillion has been wiped off global markets, the equivalent of just over half the GDP of the European Union.

Since the inauguration, countless executive orders have been signed daily and carried out with breathless speed and efficiency. Federal departments have been gutted, thousands of jobs are lying on the scrap heap; former allies have been alienated, sometimes humiliated, and the constitution trashed. Yet it seems the only thing to be heard in Congress is the sound of crickets.

As I understand it, even under the emergency powers granted to the president (at his request), under Article 1 of the Constitution, the “power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” still lies with Congress. Thus far, members of Congress appear to have lacked the appetite to enforce it. The people, however, in light of recent protests, are clearly made of sterner stuff.

Much has been said about Pluto’s passage through Aquarius representing a period when the people come into their power, and an era of “top down” government will end. I have always seen it rather differently. While governments and democracies may fall in the twenty years that Pluto will transit Aquarius, what emerges out of the ashes may not be the phoenix we had hoped for. And the current trend is clearly toward populism and autocracies.

The power of the collective is innate to Aquarius, but while liberty, equality and freedom (all Aquarian themes) were at the heart of the American Declaration of Independence (Pluto in Aquarius 1778-1798), there were a great number of men and women who had no rights at all, and certainly no right to vote, until the Nineteen Sixties. And Pluto was long gone from Aquarius by then.

What may be more relevant to the current political, economic and social tsunami is the forthcoming Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which has historically presided over enormous changes in regimes and monarchies. And we should not forget that Neptune was on the cusp of Pisces-Aries at the start of the American Civil War (the IC of America’s natal chart) while Saturn was on the Midheaven opposing it, so there is a clear resonance with that period of US history.

We may live in different times, but the symbolism of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction is the same – the dissolution of old systems, the erosion of rules and boundaries and, in the process, the struggle to regain lost ground and find new bearings.