Why does it feel like Donald Trump still runs America? We know he owns the news hole, if such a thing still exists, but why does his every proclamation set the media agenda? Is it because he can claim all 220 House Republicans as dependents? or because late-night monologues practically write themselves when he adds new riffs to his rally rambles?

The nightmare America that Trump’s presidency conjured always made me think of the gangster-run metropolis in The Triplets of Belleville, Sylvain Chomet’s 2003 animated comedy. Trump certainly made our country an omerta system of thugs. Throughout 2019, he leaned on Jerome Powell, the man he picked to run the Federal Reserve, to lower interest rates. By September, he was demanding that Powell cut interest rates to zero or even usher in negative rates, normally a break-glass option during economic crises. At the time, the U.S. economy was growing solidly and consumer spending was strong. Negative rates mean that savers are penalized and borrowers rewarded: there was no logic for such market manipulation.

People in the northern United States will not soon forget this orange-sky summer. The Canadian wildfires causing it are still burning, just one of many simultaneous conflagrations across the continent and the world. After multiple deadly wildfires in California over the past decade, after the huge deadly fires in Greece and Australia, and now with the wildfire in Maui, we have entered the Red Flag Age, where fire weather warnings are as everyday as humidity, barometric pressure, and dewpoint.

The sense of everything being combustible is not confined to climate. The Russian war on Ukraine has generated daily explosions since February 2022. In June, I remember reading of a deadly apartment building explosion in Paris alongside a deadly explosion of a barbecue restaurant in China. In August, there were stories of houses in various parts of the United States (Pennsylvania, Tennessee) spontaneously exploding. Right now it feels like everything can go up in a plume or come down in one, like Putin’s dead man walking, Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose plane exploded midair.

Twice a week, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, writes a column for the New York Times in which he tries to reassure Americans that the economy is OK, that we are on track for a soft landing after the massive disruptions of COVID. Krugman is popular in the opinion section and, unlike other columnists, is not a niche read. But he has a lot of frenemies. Commenters write that he just doesn’t get it. The chide him for not mentioning price gouging and corporate greed. It’s always the price of eggs they bring up. They also point out things like their wages not having increased in five years. This is one of the rare places in the New York Times where you hear from people who literally don’t have enough cash on hand. Leftist populism lives here, and though this is a small demographic in a non-news-reading America, it’s telling.

The inflation—on top of the MAGA insurgency, the continuing workplace and social disruptions from COVID, Putin’s war, and climate disasters—is making those on the left anxious and uncertain. They find it hard to defend Joe Biden because they want something sudden and new to fix it all. They want a reset from . . . from what exactly?

For the first time since the time of the American and French revolutions, Pluto is in the astrological sign of Aquarius. Astrologers consider this a very big deal—presumably because everything you heard about the Age of Aquarius in that the song from Hair is true. Astrologers seem to love Pluto, which astronomers only discovered in 1930 and then reclassified as a “dwarf” in 2006. Astrologers wasted little time in obsessively following the planet’s 248-year orbit around the sun, and they call this March 23 crossing “Pluto’s return.”

Since I learned what astrologers think about Pluto’s movements a few years ago, this small, cold planet has been my mascot for earthly behaviors that I don’t understand. For instance, it seems to me that American voters who call themselves independents are secretly longing for some extra-worldly force to knock them heedlessly in love with authoritarian rule. Even those who don’t yet feel it—the MAGA craziness—want to feel it. It seems like they intentionally put themselves in places (i.e., watching Fox News) where such a conversion might silently occur. In the face of so many Americans metaphorically holding up theirs arms and yelling “Take me!,” the magical thinking of astrology doesn’t seem all that weird.

Humans lie about everything from sorting recycling to murdering spouses. We do it for love and hate, money and power, convenience and kicks. Lying to the IRS without penalty has become part of the American dream, like having a newly leased Suburban in the driveway. There was already a lot of lying going on in America before Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election. But the consequences of that lie—conjoined as it was with the January 6th insurrection—have changed the country and Americans as people.

In the pantheon of presidential lying, most of it was done for misguided ideology, plausible deniability, or self-preservation: Lyndon Johnson’s insistence that Vietnam was winnable, Ronald Reagan’s insistence that the Soviet Union was going to attack, George W. Bush’s insistence that Iraq had WMD, Richard Nixon saying he was not a crook, Bill Clinton saying he did not have sexual relations with that woman.