The book was written before the election. But this post about trump as the dark trickster is about to become even more relevant and obvious in his second term.
Personification of the Dark Trickster
The trickster archetype that sneaks up on us in the dark is a deceiver, liar, cheat, and thief who figures he can get away with something while we’re distracted. He flips the status quo on its head and sometimes does so with a wry twist of irony. When he reveals some dark undercurrent about ourselves and the culture in which we live that we would rather ignore, synchronicity is usually involved.
Donald Trump may be its ultimate trickster among us. He’s admired by some, despised by many. He’s reckless and ruthless. One moment he’s savvy and cunning. The next he’s dumb and dumber rolled into one.
His name may be the simplest example of a synchronicity associated with him. The dictionary meaning of trump means to “outrank or defeat someone of something, often in a highly public way.” Like in a presidential election. “In the card game bridge, the trump card is the most powerful card in a particular round and defeats all the others — sort of like when your needs or wishes trump someone else’s. Originally trump implied a deceptive form of victory involving cheating, but that sense has been largely lost, though it’s still around in the term trumped up, meaning something that’s been falsely made up.”
During Trump’s four years as president, Twitter – renamed X – was his favorite weapon for retaliation against anyone who slighted him, which was often. He used it to humiliate and berate women, figures in the media, people of color, members of his own party, and anyone else who criticized him. And as he geared up for a second run in 2024, he used his failing Truth Social for the same purpose.
The dark trickster serves what Jung called the Shadow, those unexpressed parts of our personalities. In fact, the dark trickster is a favorite figure in American movies – Joker in the Batman franchise, particularly as played by Heath Ledger in Dark Knight Rising– and may be the paragon of this archetype. Jung saw this kind of trickster as an expression of an “earlier, rudimentary type of consciousness.”
In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, he wrote: “He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness…”
His unconsciousness is an intriguing term when applied to Trump. During his presidency he tended to tweet in the early morning hours when his handlers – like chief of staff General Kelly –were asleep. These freewheeling tweets often unraveled the very thing he attempted to implement, like the travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries. On October 18, 2017 the ban on travelers from six countries was supposed to go into effect. But two federal district courts – in Hawaii and Maryland – shot down the ban. Judge Theodore Chuang in the district of Maryland included a detailed history of Trump’s tweets to back up his opinion on the ban. In fact, his tweets had been used twice before by federal judges to block the ban.
In 1938, Carl Jung told an American reporter that Hitler was “the loudspeaker which magnified the inaudible whispers of the German soul.”
It could be that Trump rode to power as the loudspeaker for the inaudible whispers of that faction of the American soul that feels disenfranchised and marginalized by a rapidly changing world. He also might be the personification of the ultimate American Trickster, the archetypal con artist of the 21st century.
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We already are seeing evidence of this in his cabinet picks: Matt Gaetz, for instance, as attorney general, Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intellgence, vax denier RFK Jr.as secretary of Health & Human services, oil executive Chris Wright as energy secretary. All are gag worthy.
Buckle up, folks. The next four years are going to wild and dark.
