some earnestly believe Vance is a sort of “golden boy who’s beat the odds” and some feel that yes, he “beat the odds,” but not without trashing where he came from in his so-called memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Others feel Trump may dump him because he doesn’t know how to play “second banana” as well as he should; others sense that Vance is in because powerful forces want him in and have long-terms plans for him.
So, a more complicated topic than it looks, but perhaps the astrology of it all will help us cut through some of the second-guessing.
 |
| Also a 2020 Netflix film. |
First of all, I mention that Hillbilly Elegy is a “so-called” memoir because: 1) while he may have Appalachian roots and family members, Vance grew up far from his more impoverished relatives in a nice middle-class community in Ohio; 2) his book reads less like a homage to where he came from and more like a way to vent his frustration or anger against his family and against the “weaknesses” he perceived in Appalachian culture once he “beat the odds” and escaped; and 3) instead of trying to grasp the bigger picture of challenges to the entire region—like the Big Pharma-enabled Opioid crisis, like the substandard education many have been consigned to, like decades of government and corporate disinvestment, like the necessary, but difficult transition to a green economy that forced jobs displacements and cut off health care access to many—Vance’s book dwells more on blaming the victims for their own lack of progress.
In fact, the entire region has long suffered the impact of globalization on manufacturing jobs and relatedly, the free rein given to corporations to keep unions out and dictate lower wages and benefits for American workers, and—hit hard by the 2008 recession—they’re still playing catch-up.
The so-called “hillbillies” or poor white working class Appalachian people that Vance—born James Donald Bowman on August 2, 1984 in Middletown, Ohio—characterizes in his memoir as being lazy and prone to drug addiction and unstable families certainly have been through a great deal in recent decades, but as Ali Velshi put it recently on MSNBC, in a commentary entitled, “Note to JD Vance: Appalachia is in no need of political charlatans and their elegies,” public policy shouldn’t be determined by a “golden boy who beats the odds by blaming those he left behind” for not “working hard enough.”
The fact is, Vance probably did work hard to get where he is, but he also caught some nice breaks: he had stable grandparents who were willing and able to raise him in light of his mother’s struggles with addiction; he admits to having “grown up” in the U.S. Marines; he acquired his enviable higher education on the GI Bill, and he happened to find some key mentors in the Big Finance field thereafter—like extreme conservative Peter Thiel—who apparently called in favors to secure 3 jobs in 5 years in Venture Capital firms for Vance, has helped finance his political career and probably helped influence his conversion to a very conservative form of Catholicism that espouses the same no-exception attitude towards abortion bans and women’s rights.
Bottom line, Vance is no more a “self-made” man than any of us are. As V.P. and now presidential candidate Kamala Harris might put it, he didn’t just “fall out of a coconut tree!”
 |
| The "childless cat lady" meme goes viral |
The weirdness of Vance
And then there are the outlandish claims and positions (we must address the threat of "childless cat ladies" in positions of power) that Vance espouses on the ranked value our society should assign to couples who give birth to children as opposed to those who are childless, by choice or otherwise. Allowing more political voice to people according to how many children they’ve birthed---what are we, in Mussolinii’s Italy?!
We can laugh, but Vance is apparently dedicated to these extreme views, and the moments in which he reveals them piecemeal aren’t simply “weird,” passing moments, as much as some politicos are trying to minimize what he’s about. More likely, he’s a man who was wounded by life early on and has the huge, bitter chip on his shoulder to show for it. Unfortunately, that “chip” takes the form of a 922-page manifesto—Project 2025—that he’d like to see enacted because it would force a “fix” on the society he so resents.
My guess is, If Trump hadn’t snatched him away from an Ohio Senate seat to be his V.P. choice, Vance would have found a path into the top ranks of U.S. power one way or another. Clearly, judging by his alliances with Heritage Foundation head, Kevin Roberts and just the sentiments that he expresses in various interviews, he’s already a major figure in the Christian nationalist coup against the U.S. federal government that Project 2025 calls for.
And it’s appearing more and more that his elevation to V.P. status is a key part of that coup: while Trump continues to obfuscate his allegiance to the Project, Vance stands firm.
‘We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.’”
 |
| When people tell you what they're about, believe them! |
The role Project 2025 is playing in the Trump-Vance ticket
The way Vox puts it, “J.D. Vance has made it impossible for Trump to run away from Project 2025.” It supports that claim as follows:
“Former President Donald Trump has lately been trying to distance himself from Project 2025, claiming it was cooked up by the ‘severe right’ and that he doesn’t know anything about it.
But it turns out the severe right is coming from inside the house.
Kevin Roberts, the self-proclaimed ‘head’ of Project 2025, has a book coming out in September — and the book’s foreword is written by Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, who lavishly praises its ideas.
‘Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,’ Vance writes, according to the book’s Amazon page. ‘We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.’”
And Vance has been actively stumping for the world view and ideas that Project 2025 embraces: a world in which some people have more value in society, some have less and so, should have more or less voice in the way its governed. This is not democracy, folks, but with the Project crowd, our nearly 250-year history of democracy is a left-wing nightmare “true Americans” have had to suffer through and plan to replace on day one of a second Trump term. Which they plan to take, whether the Trump-Vance ticket legimately wins the votes for it or not.
There should be no illusions regarding their intentions or the seriousness of this moment, in other words.
Not surprisingly, distractions abound: for instance, there have been days when Vance’s “weird” ideas have captured more press than Trump has on the trail—leaving many to wonder if Vance is long for the ticket.
So, will Trump, in fact, dump Vance off his ticket for daring to stand out? Or will Trump meet the moment by sounding more Project 2025 than Vance does? According to a recent Turning Point town hall speech in which Trump promised his Christian audience that if they get out and vote this time they won’t have to worry about voting anymore because it’ll be “fixed and fine,” it seems like the plan is to make Vance’s claims sound tame.
Besides, given the role that deep-pocketed conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation play in the Trump campaign, I wonder if Trump even feels free to jettison Vance. Trump still hasn’t been sentenced for his 34 felony convictions in the New York hush money case, so his viability as a candidate in November may be the big question. Which might leave us to wonder if Vance is envisioned by the GOP powers-that-be as Trump’s back-up in November. We often have “October surprises” with presidential elections—I fear this time, the “surprise” could be a doozy. More on this in future posts.
For now, let’s focus back in on the Vance-Trump relationship. Yes, Vance hasn’t quite learned that his role as Trump’s V.P. pick is to praise Trump’s every word and every move and to literally or figuratively carry his “golf clubs” for him, defending his every impulse to cheat. Vance is an intelligent guy with firm ideas of his own and a history of navigating power dynamics to his own advantage…it must be tough at times to enable Trump’s “cult of personality” approach to politics. Astrologically, basking in Trump’s glory and seeking less attention for himself may be a tall order for him. More on to come on this.
Indeed, some have said that they think Trump adopted Vance as running partner because he’s a “mini-Trump,” so I guess the question would be, does Trump care about nothing but seeing himself in the “mirror” of Vance, or was the decision to take Vance on sort of thrust upon him by others? The chart comparison we will do in the next post here should have something to say about that.
For now, however, let’s examine J.D. Vance’s timed nativity, as provided by Astrodatabank.com.
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| When does a "bootstrap" story become something else? |
J.D. Vance’s nativity by the numbers
Outer planets and their cycles play key roles in would-be leaders’ charts, so to get the ball rolling here with this complicated analysis, I’ve calculated Vance’s outer planetary cyclical index. If you’ve frequented this site, you’ll know that we arrive at the overall index number by totaling up the positive angular separation numbers of any waxing cycles and setting that total against the negative sum for any waning cycles. As you’ll see in Table 1 below, Vance has 7 waxing cycles and 3 waning ones, but his final cyclical index number is still deeply negative because his waning cycles are all either in 3Q or Balsamic phase and his waxing cycles are all either in the New or Crescent phases.
So, the “heaviness” of deep negative waning numbers outweighs the fresh energies of the newer cycles, which tells us something not only about Vance’s personal worldview and about ways in which he may have felt “held back” by circumstances, but also about those born in his general timeframe.
Outer planetary cycles capture the general “tone” that prevails in societies, and they speak to the relative ease or discomfort with which individuals exist in those societies. In the case of so-called Millennials—Vance’s generation—the degree of discomfort can be particularly sharp. Their coming of age has been stressed with high levels of school debt, the economic insecurities caused by globalization and recession, two wars fought against international terrorism, a major housing crisis and the out-of-reach housing costs of our times, not to mention the growing threat of climate change and the seeming unwillingness of the “adults” to do anything about it.
Of course, every Millennial sub-group has its own axes to grind and issues to promote and the typical right-left ideological spectrum applies to them as it does to other generations, but that’s the beauty of the cyclical index—it paints a picture of social and collective forces that apply to all, even though they will become channeled in different directions, depending upon those more individual factors.
Interestingly, the cyclical profile in Table 1 bears some resemblance to today’s cyclical profile, with its 8 waxing cycles and 2 deeply waning cycles (and these two happen to be the same Saturn cycles that are waning in Vance’s nativity), so it’s fair to consider Vance and like-minded Millennials as almost tragic figures who embody the dysfunction and insecurity of that 1980s period and today, are determined to impose a one-size-fits-all solution to the “problems” they grew up with.
In other words, the threats to democracy we are dealing with today didn’t just “fall out of a coconut tree”—they represent a meaningful echo between the two timeframes. More on this ahead.
So, before we dig into Chart 1 below, let’s examine Table 1, describing his outer-planetary cycles profile, keeping in mind that the cyclical index will help us place J.D. Vance, the individual, in the greater context created by the outer planetary dynamics in his chart.
Chart 1. J.D. Vance, August 2, 1984, 8:11 a.m. DST, Middletown, Butler, OH. Source: BC/BR, Rodden rated AA. All charts are cast by author on Kepler 8.0 with Tropical Equal Houses, True Node and courtesy of Cosmic Patterns Software.
Table 1. J.D. Vance Cyclical index and profile
|
Cycle |
Waxing (in °) |
Waning (in °) |
Phase* |
Cyc. Index total |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jup-Sat |
54.15 |
|
Crescent |
|
|
Jup-Ura |
24.39 |
|
New |
|
|
Jup-Nep |
05.15 |
|
New |
|
|
Jup-Plu |
64.48 |
|
Crescent |
|
|
Sat-Ura |
|
-330.24 |
Balsamic |
|
|
Sat-Nep |
|
-311.00 |
3Q |
|
|
Sat-Plu |
10.33 |
|
New |
|
|
Ura-Nep |
|
-340.36 |
Balsamic |
|
|
Ura-Plu |
40.09 |
|
New |
|
|
Nep-Plu |
59.33 |
|
Crescent |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sub-totals (rounded to nearest degree) |
188.00 |
-982.00 |
|
|
|
Total (algebraic sum) |
|
|
|
-794.00 |
*The phase degree spans, starting with the faster-moving planet relative to the slower one, are New: 0°-44°.59’; Crescent: 45°.00-89°.59’; First Quarter (1Q): 90°.00-134°.59’; Gibbous: 135°.00-179°.59’; Full (2Q): 180°.00-224°.59’; Disseminating: 225°.00-269°.59’; Last Quarter (3Q): 270°.00-314°.59’; Balsamic: 315°.00-359°.59’.
What the index tells us
Vance was born into a generation that has lusted after progress—notice that all of the Jupiter cycles in Table 1 above are waxing, in either New or Crescent phase. There’s a hint of rebellion afloat with these cycles as well: the 1980 Jupiter-Saturn cycle at work here first perfected in air sign Libra in the midst of a long earth sign Jupiter-Saturn synod (series of cycles, usually in the same element)—so it’s an “anomalous” cycle that proceeded to foster a conservative revolution of sorts in our politics with the Reagan presidency. Some claim, in fact, that Project 2025—which has been in development from around this time—was seeded by the Reagan years. This makes even deeper sense if we consider that our society may now be radically re-ordered again--this time under the Aquarius Jupiter-Saturn cycle that perfected in December 2020, so trine the early Libra Jupiter-Saturn cycle of 1981.
That rebellious 1980s Jupiter-Saturn cycle was only exacerbated by the fresh New energies of the Jupiter-Uranus cycle we see in Table 1, a cycle that conjoined in February 1983 in early, Jupiter-ruled Sagittarius. The push for technology-fueled change was unstoppable, bringing us Internet-driven globalization and the economic juggernaut of Milton Friedman-style neoliberalism that literally overturned the lives of American workers by the early 1990s—especially those in the Rust Belt region Vance grew up in—but jump-started the immense wealth inequality gap that has only gotten worse over time, bringing us the “great” recession of 2008, and skipping forward, the Trump administration and its race-baiting quest to secure his personal power and grease the skids for American billionaires.
For its part, the Jupiter-Neptune cycle we see in New phase in Table 1 launched at the transformative “world point,” 0°+Capricorn, just months before Vance’s birth, so empowering the breaking down of social structures for the sake of “growth” and profit.
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| Pres. Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan. |
For the already well-to-do, it was the best of times; for anyone dependent upon receiving a living wage or on a social safety net or a willing and compassionate federal government (perhaps describing many in Vance’s birth family), it was the worst of times. The late 1970s recession was still being felt by such Americans; the AIDS crisis was in full force and being basically ignored by Reagan; U.S. relations with Middle Eastern nations were beginning to devolve into more terrorist incidents; poverty-driven urban crime and addiction levels were troubling; conglomerates like Ma Bell and other utilities were being broken up to make way for a deregulated “Wild West” of communications and energy technologies, resulting in higher prices.
Even so, Reagan was easily re-elected, further entrenching the dysfunction of that decade for all but the wealthiest, whom he rewarded with deep tax cuts and a “trickle-down economics” theory that (they thought) legitimized their quest for a much bigger piece of the American pie. This theory was also used (with a bit of tweaking) to justify what soon took shape under Reagan’s early 1990s successor, George H.W. Bush: global trade agreements like NAFTA. This neoliberal project, designed to move American manufacturing jobs overseas or to Mexico, despite the acute resentment that workers in his region were experiencing, was in the air Vance breathed growing up, in other words.
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| Usha Vance (nee Chilukuri) |
Also “in the air” growing up was a fresh Crescent Jupiter-Pluto cycle that first perfected in late Libra in November 1981. Given his talents and the outstanding education he managed to receive, he, like so many others, had powerful opportunities and choices: to defend and work for his hurting birth family and friends and community, or to follow the ambitious Jupiterian path of least resistance, towards money and powerful connections. In his wife—a fellow Yale Law School graduate, Usha (born Usha Chilukuri), he apparently found both. From Wikipedia:
“Her family belongs to the Telugu community and migrated from Andhra Pradesh, India, in the 1980s.[9] She was [born] and raised in San Diego's upper-middle-class Rancho Peñasquitos suburb.[10][11]
In 2003 she graduated from Mt. Carmel High School, where she performed in the marching band.[1][12][7] She has one sister, Shreya.[11] Childhood friends described her as a "leader" and a "bookworm".[13] She attended Yale University, graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in history, with membership in Phi Beta Kappa. She then attended Clare College, Cambridge, in England, as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, receiving a Master of Philosophy in early modern history in 2010.[14]
In 2013, Vance obtained her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, where she was the Executive Development Editor of the Yale Law Journal and Managing Editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Technology.[15][16][17] During her time at Yale, she also taught American history as a Yale-China Teaching Fellow at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China…
…In 2014–15 Vance served as a law clerk for then–District of Columbia Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh and in 2017–18 for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.[18] She was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in May 2019 and worked for the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, handling civil litigation and appeals in cases involving higher education, local government, entertainment and technology, until July 2024, when she resigned ‘to focus on caring for our family’.”
Usha Vance won’t be the last woman to give up a lucrative, brilliant career to defer to her husband’s ambitions and take care of her family, yet her husband (they married in 2014 and have 3 children to date) has quite a reputation for promoting a harshly skewed view of family values—a view that one commentator suggested is laced with “hatred for women. Yet, according to Wikipedia,
‘Vance called Chilukuri his ‘Yale spirit guide’ because she was a critical source of support and encouragement in his academic and professional life.’[25] “
Spoken like a true wounded child whose mother couldn’t give him what he needed, so he’s found a woman who will. Despite his good fortune, however, he seems compelled to bash people who choose not to have children, for whatever reason. From CNN.com:
“Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance has a history of making disparaging remarks toward people without children, a CNN KFile review of his comments shows, including fundraising off his now-infamous ‘childless cat lady’ remarks in a series of emails that called Democratic leaders ‘childless sociopaths’ who ‘don’t have a direct stake in this country.’
In November 2020, Vance said on a conservative podcast that childless Americans, especially those in the country’s ‘leadership class,’ were ‘more sociopathic’ than those with children and made the country ‘less mentally stable.’ Vance added that the ‘most deranged’ and ‘most psychotic’ commentators on Twitter – now known as X - were typically childless.”
In his imagination, perhaps, childlessness evokes the feelings of betrayal he might have felt growing up as the child of an addicted mother—perhaps he was even made to feel like an unwanted child. We can all empathize with the pain of such a wound—but trying to bully people into having children to satisfy his own needs and his odd ideas about a “mentally stable” society is quite another story.
At this point we’ll turn our attention to Vance’s birth chart, but one last word about the cycles in Table 1. Suffice to say here that three very important cycles for those seeking political power are also waning in Vance’s chart—Saturn-Uranus, Saturn-Neptune and Uranus-Neptune. The first undoubtedly threw institutional challenges in his path growing up—perhaps even exposing him to extra-legal behavior or domestic violence; the second probably added to the frightening sense of chaos that he observed and experienced in his birth family; and the third likely provided him with an overwhelming sense that a new world order was looming and that it would be every man for himself going forward. Taken all together, these heavy waning cycles could very well feel like a weight holding him down, yet a source of internal drive and power at the same time.
 |
| Family is both a personal and political statement for Vance. |
J.D. Vance, born August 2, 1984, 8:11 a.m., Middletown, OH
Let’s refresh our memory about what Chart 1 above looks like:
For starters, Vance’s Leo Sun sits in his confining and undermining 12th house, conjunct Juno and Vesta, square Scorpio Saturn and trine Sagittarius Uranus, possibly pointing to the abuse and instability he reports experiencing in his early life. He has 6 fixed points, including his ASC and MC, so he may have had a much greater need for stability than many parents could have provided. That 3 of those fixed points are in Leo suggests the even greater need to feel “special,” and with Leo Venus at his ASC and Moon in resonant Libra, he would have likely looked to the women in his life to satisfy that need. He often mentions his grandmother, not surprisingly. He would have felt the indignities of poverty that he describe as a "way of life" in Appalachia in his very core.
Juno and Vesta probably speak to the support provided by his grandparents and their more stable Ohio home. Legal action (Saturn square) would have been needed for his adoption by Bob Hamel, his mother’s 3rd husband, and for the name change that resulted from that. Vance claims to have experienced abuse in his mother’s household: unfortunately, controlling Leo-Scorpio squares and 12th house Suns can reflect abusive situations.
 |
| In the Marines, Vance was known as J.D. Hamel |
It’s not at all surprising astrologically that after graduating high school in 2003, with his progressed Sun having crossed over his Leo ASC into his first house (chart not shown), he left his grandparents’ home to enlist in the Marines, serving as a combat correspondent in Iraq and in a Marine Public Affairs effort. He claims to have learned “how to live like an adult” in the Marines. For what it’s worth, as he took this giant leap into adulthood, his natal Uranus had gone direct by progression and was then conjunct his progressed Mars in early Sagittarius. The quest to prove himself by any means necessary was on.
Considering the primal importance of identity to a Leo Sun individual—especially one with Leo rising as well—it’s probably quite significant that he went through name changes as a child, replacing his birth name James Donald Bowman with James David Hamel (after his mother’s 3rd husband, who adopted him) and then to J.D. Vance (with Vance being his mother’s birth name).
On that note, to say that Vance has had a conflicted relationship with his mother and her struggles with addiction seems to be an understatement; here we see that his natal Moon falls in Libra in his 2nd house, opposite a disruptive Aries Eris in his 8th, with this axis t-square his Mercury/No. Node midpoint (Cancer), a midpoint that speaks to the ability to forge helpful alliances through the sharing of information and ideas. It’s quite possible that the narrative at the heart of his Hillbilly Elegy has “made” him in more ways than one.
This possibility would be reinforced by his Leo Venus disposing that disrupted Libra Moon and ruling his 10th house of parents and public career and his 3rd house of community life, siblings, communications and education. He’s basically made a career out of where he came from—and according to some, by betraying those early roots. His Leo Venus also squares his Scorpio Mars, which rules his 4th house of home and—in mundane astrology, of the People at the grass roots level—he simply can’t look out at the greater society without projecting his own troubled childhood into what he sees.
 |
| WSJ reports that Iraq turned J.D. Hamel/Vance against foreign wars. |
Mars also rules his 9th house of Law, higher education, foreign travel and influences, which is interesting because, aside from housing his MC, which is closely opposed by his 3rd house Scorpio Mars, Vance’s 9th is curiously empty, which seems strange for a man who graduated from Yale Law School, but considering the path he took from there, it makes sense: Vance finished school and practiced law for about two years before he moved to San Francisco to pursue a job in Mithril Capital, the venture capital firm of extreme conservative Peter Thiel.
So, even though the Law provided a springboard for his political ambitions, it has been more his wife’s career than it has been his life’s work—in fact, his Leo Venus at his ASC t-squares this fixed Mars-MC opposition, suggesting that he has been able to leverage his wife’s brilliant career (see earlier description) for his political purposes.
With that much said, it’s difficult to miss that an amazing 8 of the traditional 10 planets and luminaries we use to analyze a birth chart fall in Vance’s lower hemisphere, basically sweeping around from his 1st house Virgo Mercury to his 5th house Capricorn Jupiter. Even more amazingly, all five of his outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) reside in these packed few houses, with a special focus on his family related 4th and 5th houses. Notice also that his Chiron (Gemini) falls conjunct his North Node at the top of his chart and forms several difficult aspects with his outer planets, confirming what we already know about his character—that he grew up feeling “wounded” by family and feeling held down by them.
In fact, Chiron (Gemini) and the Nodal axis (Gemini-Sagittarius) t-square his dignified Virgo Mercury, speaking to his ongoing quest to make a career out of telling his personal story about overcoming a wounded childhood. Like Trump before him, he’s been able to leverage the well-received book he wrote into a visual project—in his case, a Netflix film of Hillbilly Elegy—which gave him the name recognition he needed to pursue public office. The question we might be wondering is, how far will this personal/collective projection “dance” he’s managed to do carry him? Let’s examine his lower hemisphere outer planets more closely.
Jupiter Rx (Capricorn) is situated on the leading edge of his arc of outer planets and falls comfortably conjunct his Neptune (late Sagittarius) and—if we stretch the orb a bit—it’s also sextile his late Libra Pluto, which could continue to land plum opportunities in his lap. The fact that the OP cycles formed by his somewhat constrained Rx Jupiter are all waxing speaks to his ambition and his willingness to create his own reality (Jupiter Rx-Neptune Rx), if it means he can break out of any perceived restraints. This is a willingness that is reinforced by his Venus-Neptune Rx trine (Leo-Sagittarius)—an aspect that certainly reflects his “spirit guide” comments about his wife, Usha (see earlier).
 |
| The "weird" label seems to be sticking to the Trump-Vance ticket. |
We’ve seen how Vance’s 4th house Uranus Rx (Sagittarius) ties into his Nodal axis and t-squares his 1st house Mercury (Virgo) and has likely facilitated the telling of his story in various media forms. Interestingly, this Uranus Rx sits within orb of his Mars/Neptune midpoint (Sagittarius), which midpoints expert Michael Munkasey interprets as follows:
“Unusual stamina to speed up the outcome of activities; an unconventional approach to forcing idealism or socialism on others; a noisy rebellion against aggravating dreams or visions forced by others.” [1]
Which may well be the source of what the Harris camp is calling his “weirdness” about family issues (4th house). This willingness to impose his deeply-held, experience-derived “weird” ideas on the rest of us would be powerfully egged on by the New status of both his Jupiter Rx-Uranus Rx and Saturn-Pluto (Scorpio-Libra) cycles. Given his essentially fixed, controlling needs and his wounded nature, we can probably expect that he will keep working at this “weird” project until he feels vindicated.
This likely perseverance—fueled, perhaps by a deep well of anger and resentment—is reinforced by the presence of a staunch Scorpio Mars at his IC, which anchors in his 4th house the fixed t-square with his Taurus MC and Leo Venus-ASC. We can, perhaps, expect to hear more hateful “Us v. Them” rhetoric from him as things heat up in this election year because it’s likely he will feel driven to resolve this fixed t-square in his Aquarius 7th house of enemies. All of which makes him a good fit for the Project 2025’s model of “leadership.”
With that in mind, the trine Libra Pluto forms in this chart with his DSC (Aquarius) should be a sobering wake-up call. This man feels born to wield Power-writ-large and, to make things worse, he probably feels that Life “owes him” because he was cheated out of the love and “specialness” he needed as a child. We’ve seen him lean into the Project worldview’s vision of a “revolution” that requires “loading our muskets,” and frankly, with all this outer planetary energy in his sensitive lower hemisphere, itching to make it big in the wider world, it’s hard to say where he would stop.
 |
| Is Vance truly a "chameleon?" |
Final thoughts
There’s been a lot of talk about Vance’s shifting views about Trump over the years, to the point of one former Yale associate labeling him a “chameleon,” but I don’t think after digging into his natal profile that this should deflect us from what appears to be the very fixed inner drive that compels him to do whatever it takes to get ahead. I get why his shifting perspectives are troubling at this point, however: it’s frankly unclear where his ethical boundaries lie, and it’s easy to imagine that those boundaries could be malleable depending upon the exigencies and opportunities of the moment, too.
Bottom line, we might want to take him both seriously and literally—more to come on that and about the Trump/Vance duo in the next post.
Meanwhile, keep it Light!
Notes:
[1] Michael Munkasey, Midpoints: Unleashing the Power of the Planets, ACS Publications, San Diego, CA, 1991, p. 241.
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Raye Robertson is a practicing astrologer, writer and retired educator. A graduate of the Faculty of Astrological Studies (U.K.), Raye focuses on mundane, collective-oriented astrology, with a particular interest in current affairs, U.S. history, culture and media, the astrology of generations, and public concerns such as education and health. Her articles on these topics have appeared in several key astrology journals over the years, and she has authored three books on key mundane astrology topics that are currently available on Amazon Kindle. For information about individual chart readings, contact: robertsonraye@gmail.com.
© Raye Robertson 2024. All rights reserved.
