Impossible Politics: Donald Trump and The Uncanny

Trans-rational sensemaking around the assassination attempt

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There was a time, not so long ago, when we accepted that the impossible was commonplace. The world was full of miraculous healings and levitating sages. A goddess could be caught in a fishermen’s net. A turn of the head could change history. 

Like the rest of the world, I’ve spent the last week trying to make sense of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. What I’ve been wrestling with, aside from the political and cultural ramifications, is the feeling of unreality around the incident.

That someone would try to assassinate Trump is not unusual in America’s political climate. There have been 15 assassination attempts on US presidents or candidates since 1835. In a country tearing itself apart across economic and ideological lines, it’s a tragic but predictable occurrence.

What has gripped me most in the last week is not the attempt, but just how close the bullet came to killing Trump. How impossible it seems. How unrealistic. We can easily rationalise a close miss. As one expert put it, going for a headshot instead of a body shot at that distance is the mark of an amateur marksman who’s watched too many movies. We also know that Thomas Crooks was confronted moments before and may have rushed the shot.

But for many people I’ve spoken to, and in many of the social posts I’ve trawled through, the rational explanations don’t seem to satisfy the sense of weirdness everyone is feeling. The fact that we still know so little about Crooks or his motivations only deepens that uncanny feeling.

Some have dived into conspiracy theory, while others have reached for occult explanations. Whatever our chosen sensemaking apparatus, we are all responding to a sense of unreality that has been growing steadily in the zeitgeist.

In the last decade, the Pentagon has admitted that they are regularly encountering UFO’s, and provided apparent video evidence. Q-Anon became a religious and political force in the US, while huge swathes of the wellbeing and spiritual worlds became mired in conspiratorial thinking. The idea that most of our information ecosystem is part of an elaborate PsyOp is prevalent online. In short, our idea of what is real is being challenged like never before.

These are all signs that our collective unconscious is bursting through the fragile edifice of rationality, something I’ve called ‘The Age of Breach’. From one perspective, this is terrifying; a return to the superstitious madness that our ancestors strived to escape during the Enlightenment. From another perspective, it’s the messy healing of a society that tried in vain to cut itself off from anything it couldn’t measure.

For philosophers like Terence McKenna, the universe itself selects for ever-greater novelty and complexity, and a growing sense of strangeness and paradox is inevitable. As he put it in a prescient 1998 interview: 

"I think it's just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder and finally it's going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. People are gonna say what the hell is going on. It's just too nuts….The systems which are in place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed.”

Our politics is increasingly trans-rational. The trans-rational is not irrational; it means rationality plus that which we don’t yet understand. The narrow box of what we believe is possible is breaking, and from it flows the uncanny, the strange, the fated. All of these are anathema to the Western mind, and yet we can’t help talking about how weird things are.

Leaving space for the possibility that we are living in trans-rational times doesn’t mean blindly embracing fantasy and shoddy sensemaking to gain a comforting but illusory sense of order. Instead, it’s about entertaining the possibility that there is something beyond human rationality that is as real as we are. Even acknowledging this as a possibility is taboo to the Western mind, which is partly why conspiracy theories have become popular as an outlet for the contradictions in our psyches.

Trump has always acted, wittingly or not, as a node for these impulses. As Corey Pein argued back in 2016, Trump is Loki; a chaotic trickster. He is a rod for archetypal projection; when the denizens of 4Chan believed they were memeing Trump into office in 2016, they were mired in an occult belief system involving the Egyptian chaos-god Kek, which they believed was manifesting as Pepe the Frog, and which was willing Trump into office.

The messaging boards were rife with numerology, symbolism and memetic synchronicities: the raw materials of the symbolic realm of our collective unconscious. That which makes the impossible possible.

For the political establishment, it was impossible for Trump to be elected in 2016, and yet he was. They didn’t see it coming, because they were looking at the wrong realities, both social and psycho-spiritual. This is why trying to make sense of our politics today through a purely rationalist lens will never give us insight into the weirdness of the times. We have to learn trans-rational skills, ways of seeing that help us navigate the implicit and the unconscious.

In this piece, as I did in The Novelty Famine, I’m going to use a practice called Somatic Inquiry to explore the mythic and transpersonal layer of the Trump assassination attempt and the wider political moment we’re living through.

Somatic Inquiry is inspired by the practice of Inquiry taught in the Diamond Approach. It’s a type of meditation I practice in which we speak (or write) while embodying an attitude of radical curiosity, tracking body sensations, images and thoughts as they arise and allowing each to become another thread of inquiry. As before, I’ll make minor edits for clarity and leave the text largely unchanged.