Back on September 4, CNN photographer Khalil Abdallah was in the right place at the right time to capture lightning striking the White House. Lightning strikes near the Capitol are not uncommon. The 550-foot Washington Monument—the world’s tallest freestanding structure when it was completed in 1884—takes a hit at least once a year; the White House, less frequently. I was struck by Abdallah’s tweeted photo because the lightning striking at the very center of the presidential residence reminded me of The Tower tarot card.

One of the most popular tarot decks, known as Rider-Waite, depicts a burning tower being struck by lightning or fire from the sky, its top section dislodged and crumbling, and a man and a woman falling toward earth as tongues of fire rain down. The standard tarot deck contains suits of swords, wands, cups, and coins (or pentacles), but also a separate suit of elaborately depicted figures named “trumps,” short for “triumphs” (trionfi in Italian). Trionfi/Trumps was a 15th-century Italian card game that took images from allegorically themed carnival parades depicting the ups and downs of Fortune’s Wheel (success, reversal, and downfall).

The Tower card is associated with sudden, disruptive revelation and potentially destructive change. It is said to be derived from the biblical Tower of Babel, built by men desiring to reach heaven. God destroys this towering symbol of false hopes and ideas to show that power alone does not make a person great; he or she needs humility and wisdom. In the card’s evolution from the 1400s to 1909 , it retained variants of burning buildings and lightning. The Rider-Waite card depicts the top of The Tower as a crown (yellow, like certain unnatural coiffures).

Even those who know nothing about tarot trumps will recognize how the cards’ tropes have permeated Western culture. The Tower tarot remains a bridge between the Tower of Babel story and everyday allusions like the Gershwin song that most people know from An American in Paris:

I’ll build a stairway to Paradise
With a new step ev’ry day!
I’m gonna get there at any price;
Stand aside, I’m on my way!

Donald Trump, whose secondary residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue took the hit on September 4, always wanted to get there at any price. His Paradise was money, of course, but also the high places where everyone wants to have friends. Up until middle age, Trump sought to build the world’s tallest building and live in its penthouse “above the clouds.” This was his dream even though it was no longer a thing for men who were young in the mid-1970s to want to build towers. In the first great age of the skyscraper (1900-1919), height records were broken year after year: the Singer Tower in 1906, the Met Life Tower in 1909, the Woolworth Building in 1910. Architects never stopped wanting to design these towers, but the post-Gilded Age boom years—the space race of its time—were long gone. After the Twin Towers went up in 1972 (110 floors, 1368 and 1362 feet), height that colossal had become an abstraction. In the 1974 disaster movie The Towering Inferno, the building that turns into a death trap during its dedication is 138 stories and 1,688 feet tall. What did height matter when America’s economy began to falter? What did a tall building matter when you didn’t have oil?

Unfazed, Trump proposed his first Stairway to Paradise in 1985, on the abandoned West Side rail yards of Penn Central at 66th Street: 150 stories and 1,670 feet high. New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger could not get over how cut off an apartment at 150 stories would be from street-level weather, “how psychologically distant” from the city below. Also in 1985, Trump proposed for the site of the former Coliseum at Columbus Circle a 135-story, octagonal, terraced building that literally spiraled upward. This time, Goldberger likened Trump’s proposal to “storybook pictures of the Tower of Babel.”

Eleven years later—and after multiple bankruptcies and defaulting on nearly $1 billion worth of debt—Trump again proposed the world’s tallest building. This one would be the new site for the New York Stock Exchange: 140 floors, 1,792 feet high, housing potentially 100,000 office workers. In order to live at the foot of Wall Street, however, the Kohn Pedersen Fox-designed tower would have to be built on pilings in the East River. Trump didn’t own the offshore property, and the East River was jinxed by numerous failed proposals. The governmental hurdles to building would’ve been a stretch even for someone without Trump’s enormous credit problems.

You might say that Trump’s last Promethean pitch to live above the clouds was nothing compared to what he pulled off the year before. In 1995, he faced down the wreckage of years of bad debts and the gross mismanagement of casinos, his airline business, and his purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Trump “cut a deal with banks that wiped out the last of his personal debt,” ultimately paying “less than half of the roughly $110 million he owed.” As the New York Times reported, he declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 tax returns, large enough to wipe out more than $50 million a year in taxable income over 18 years.

Trump walked away from his debts and immediately began borrowing again to build another sandcastle empire. Six years later, on 9/11, he called into WWOR-TV (channel 9) from Trump Tower wanting to talk about the disaster downtown. He mentioned having called his friend Larry Silverstein, who had just purchased the Towers, to make sure he was safe. That was one bit of revealed humanity. But he couldn’t resist putting in a plug for his own property and its sudden (localized) prominence: “40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually—before the World Trade Center—was the tallest. And then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest. And now it’s the tallest.” Was the entire reason for the call to reframe the narrative of “tallest building in Manhattan” to “tallest building downtown”. . . to declare himself master of the universe in a pond that had just got tragically smaller?

In the helter-skelter new world order, Trump nursed any lingering wounds about his tower failures by attempting to brand himself as “New York’s Native Son” with ownership of the Empire State Building—a failed lease acquisition scheme that ended in drawn-out lawsuits and public shaming. He simply could not stop attempting to superimpose his identity onto monuments that had emotive value to the New York public. Or maybe it was only to himself that the tallest tower had emotive value. Since at least the medieval manor, a tower was a symbol of dominance. Perhaps it was something from childhood—say, the Tower of London housing both the Royal Mint and the Crown Jewels—that drove his compulsion. Whatever the reason, Trump clung to both his tower and his branding desires as nefariously as Shakespeare’s Richard III: “The king’s name is a tower of strength.” Even up to the election, Trump’s website listed the Empire State Building as a previously owned property.

The Tower is the only card in the Rider-Waite deck where the image depicts something manmade, and Donald Trump is king of the manmade. Ironically, though, and contrary to his oil portrait being titled The Visionary, Trump never “makes” anything that no one else hasn’t already mastered. His only real accomplishment was getting banks to give him enormous loans to their own detriment. He assembled other people’s money to outdo the return on something already done; his value added was novel illegal financing schemes (i.e., cheating). Just look at the half-there stuff that was repossessed in 1991: “his 282-foot Trump Princess yacht, a 49% stake in New York’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, the Trump Shuttle airline and his 27% stake in Alexanders Inc., a department store chain.” Much of his $40 million debt for the yacht was funded by Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Co., which repossessed the vessel and had to write off a big chunk upon selling it because Trump’s interior design was so horrendous. His ham-fisted dilettantish dabbling—that is, his daring to layer more gold things upon existing gold things—left his toxic mark on otherwise mundane failures.

However much of a fool history has made of Trump, it is eerie how he never really crashes when he’s failed a business or broken the law. He never really crashes when he’s fallen to the ground. (“Trump” is short for “Triumph,” right?) He always finds someone to take the hit for him, even if it’s the biggest banks in the world. However much he lies about what he paid for something, he always gets out of paying the price in the end. Being above the clouds is nothing compared to being above the law. Goldberger, the architecture critic, told Politico’s Michael Kruse in 2016 that he saw the Donald Trump of 1988 “as an amalgam of Greek mythology’s Icarus and Narcissus.” I don’t know about that. There’s a huge difference between actions that inspire myth and people who distort myth as a means of deception. “A given myth has never a meaning in itself and by itself,” Claude Lévi‐Strauss said in 1973, “but it is only in a position to another myth that we can unravel the meaning.” Trump took the gilded mythology of one age and the build-high mythology of another age and the Rat Pack mythology that peaked around 1960 and soldered them onto a 1970s hot tub/swinger mythology to fashion a fishing lure for both creditors and voters.

If anything, Trump seems a malefic mythological figure, even as a young man forever pursing his lips. He seems a tormentor to the core—one whose single-minded desire for a superficial kind of dominance is denied so consistently that, out of spite, be becomes the ruler of a powerful kingdom only to destroy that accrued power with his superficiality. The Special Counsel’s office has just revealed that, well into his presidential campaign, Trump was chomping at the bit to build that elusive tower of his—not in Manhattan but in Moscow. That was the glittering prize his jaded eyes had set themselves on—that bottomless source of oligarch capital. The American presidency, by contrast, was gravy.

One interesting feature of the Rider-Waite tarot card is that gives no indication that the man and woman falling from the lightning-struck tower are royalty. They might well be innocent servants or the not-so-innocent enablers. It’s always the collateral that gets damaged. Trump never crashes in the same way that most of the banking CEOs who took billions in bailout funding from taxpayers during the recession were never financially penalized let alone jailed. Bank of America—whose Bryant Park Tower looks like a cracked stalagmite in an ice cave—received $45 billion in TARP money, and when Chief Executive Kenneth Lewis left the company in 2009, he didn’t get his 2009 salary and bonus . . . only a retirement and stock package worth between $69 million and $120 million. To add insult to injury, BOA gave employees $3.3 billion in bonuses for 2008, with 172 employees receiving at least $1 million. A very Trumpian outcome all around.

The Tower card that will never be a harbinger of Trump’s downfall could easily apply to us, to America. Every empire’s hubris gets the reconciler it deserves. Ours—this leader with no capacity to lead—has established a controlling interest in our Constitution. He gamed our empire’s hubris by promising to build a wall to keep out the world’s problems, but all he has done is lock us up in a tower and brought us to a crisis.

I don’t know why I like the history of tarot cards. Maybe it’s because the deck originated in medieval Marseilles, and I suppose that would make me an elitist. I bet that the enormous gulf between Americans with an historical interest in magical thinking and Americans who use magical thinking to develop their political views is part of America’s hamartia. A 1984 New York Times profile of Trump describes his detractors seeing him “as a rogue billionaire, loose in the city like some sort of movie monster, unrestrained by the bounds of good taste or by city officials to whom he makes campaign contributions, ready to transform Midtown into another glass-and-glitz downtown Houston, with Central Park for parking.” Back then it was a snooty class thing and a matter of taste. Today, if you’re against the lying tax cheat billionaire dismantling our democracy, you’re an elitist even if you’re a blue-collar worker.

In January, incoming House members that the MAGA foot soldiers consider the progressive elite will be targeting at least 85 topics in a wave of investigations and subpoenas directed at Trump’s White House. As former federal prosecutor Ken White put it in the Atlantic, “Subpoenas will fly like arrows at Agincourt.” A better metaphor for our situation might be Trump as the “movie monster” hugging the spire of the Empire State Building (his one true but unattainable love) while swatting at 85 toy airplanes. We’ve seen how the movie ends, but it’s anyone’s guess if this king will ever fall from The Tower. §