To listen to this blog post, including an audio description of each card, click below.
It’s so interesting how, when we talk about Biden and Trump, most people look at them individually. I hear people talking about their strengths and challenges, as individuals running a race. But…they’re running against each other. What could we discern by looking at them with a relationship spread?
Thus, I’m turning to what I think of as my classic H-shaped relationship spread, though with an extra card for the outcome, it won’t look like an H to you.
Of course, I’ve put Biden on the left and Trump on the right in this spread. Each side of the H starts with a card for the person and who they are in the relationship. The next card down is who they are inside, in the relationship, and the bottom card is their external actions with regard to each other. The little handles on the outside of the H are how they’re affecting each other. The middle card is the relationship itself. The middle bottom card is the outcome. And the card peeking out from the bottom of the deck is the basis of all of this.
To start with the middle card, the relationship itself, this is a campaign. We have the Eight of Pentacles here. And thus, it’s about money and work.
What do we NOT see here? We don’t see cards that would indicate one of them oppressing the other. I don’t see cards related to Trump’s legal problems, for example–which to me indicates that Biden is not involved in any of the legal actions against Trump. This also makes sense because we know that those cases involve the Justice Department, which is independent (though Trump has threatened that it may cease to be independent if he wins), and the states, which are independent as well.
What else do we NOT see here, in this card? Well, cups, for one thing. I don’t think the two of them have an emotional history together. It’s not personal between them as individual people.
I wouldn’t be a good leftist if I didn’t also notice that money and work also raise questions of labor and labor practices, and how working people are treated. I haven’t seen any discussions of how these two men treat people who work for them (other then the stories about how Trump doesn’t pay contractors or lawyers). But this is what we look to tarot for–some of the themes that we aren’t noticing on the surface of the discourse. I have, though, seen discussions of the economy in terms of how people are doing. Pundits say the economy is strong, but I keep asking them (they can’t hear me, unfortunately!), is it? This card (still the Eight of Pentacles) says to me that the key of this question is how people are doing, working class people, not the middle or upper classes who always think they’re the center of everything. The campaigns would do well to ask, how is the economy doing for working class people? You know, the people who aren’t listening to your podcast, or you think they aren’t because you’re such a snob. (Sorry, I get a little annoyed listening to reporters.)
The cards at the top of the H are very telling in terms of strategy. Biden’s Eight of Wands suggests a targeted strategy and the speed of the arrows (the eight wands) makes me think he sees this as a sprint to the finish, a targeted sprint to the finish, at the end. Trump’s The World is indicative of his tendency to see himself as being at the center of it all, in a place where people love him. He’s traveling. Sometimes this card can have a hint of being done with something, as if you’ve already graduated. (It’s the 21st card of the major arcana, and I think of it as turning 21, so I associate it with graduation.) He doesn’t think he has graduated from being president, but perhaps, if you want to look at it that way, he has. He loves the attention, but the eyes of the world being on you is not necessarily a good thing. I also do still wonder if he’s thinking of world travel, if his legal cases start to alarm him even more than they already do. Maybe this card is also related to his motivation, to maintain his freedom to move about the world. If we turn back to Biden’s card and think about motivation, the Eight of Wands also makes sense; Biden does have certain targeted issues that he feels he’s not done with yet. And he’s surrounded by other Eights in this spread as well.
They both have Twos indicating their inner states. The contrast is stark: Biden’s Two of Cups suggests his tendency to go around hugging people, while Trump’s Two of Swords calls to mind his sharp words and his belief that he’s in a knife fight. It’s also noteworthy that the Two of Cups is a card of love and affection, there are two people on the card, while the Two of Swords is a person alone.
What are they doing? Trump in his loneliness throws money around, throws a party, but he’s alone even there. This is something I noticed about him on the dais at a recent speech that I watched; he’s alone in a crowd. (I’m not a Trump supporter! I watched this on tv.) Biden’s Seven of Cups isn’t a super strong card for action. It makes me wonder what he’s doing. It’s such a dreamy card. He wants to inspire hope. But I don’t know if he’s thinking about the level of cynicism that is out there. This Seven of Cups feels like our current Neptune in Pisces. What are people dreaming about, and what do they remember? Do voters have a firm hold on reality? Does Biden think they don’t (and if so, is he right? I’m not sure).
How they’re both being affected: Biden is walking away to be by himself. Everyone’s commenting on it and so is this Eight of Cups card. He’s leaving behind all the broken things to go think alone. The broken glasses behind him seem indicative of so much that has broken in the world in the last few months. But thinking symbolically, these cups are also broken relationships with allies who used to support him. He is turning his back on those relationships for a time to take time to think and perhaps pray. He feels the loss, the many losses. And that is why he wants more time alone, even though time in which to campaign is running out.
Trump has the Queen of Wands for how this is all affecting him. He knows he needs a woman as his running mate and it’s killing him (those last three words are just my opinion). He hates to share the stage, and, with a woman?! But that is his next step.
Before I turn to the outcome card, I want to turn to the card at the bottom of the deck, the Five of Swords. To me this is the walking away from a fight card. There is a fight to be had. But these two aren’t ready for it, neither of them. The country isn’t ready for it.
And, is it coming? A fight, I mean.
Well, in a way, in that certainly the campaign is here and there will be an election.
But the outcome card doesn’t look like the result of a fight, is the thing. The outcome is the Empress. And that’s fascinating to me because I draw cards on politics often, though I don’t always take the time to write about them publicly. When I draw on the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, I always seem to draw the Empress. Some people may think that’s because American women play a big role because of Dobbs last year. Maybe? That doesn’t feel to me like that’s it, though. Dobbs is big, but is it election-changing big? At a time when there are a lot of other things going on? Maybe, but I still wonder if we end up with a woman president. That could be Kamala Harris, it could be Trump’s as yet unknown running mate–one option is that either of these men could drop out of the race for any of a multitude of reasons (there’s no need to be so morbid, they could drop out for all sorts of reasons, such as the ubiquitous health and family concerns–the main reason any politician steps away, right?). But that’s only one way in which the Empress could end up making sense as the outcome. And we can ask, is this one woman, or many? Going back to the “American women are pissed off over Dobbs” idea–I’d just note that this is an outcome card. It’s not the means, not the strategy, but the outcome. The Empress is a woman in her garden, taking care of the plants, planting seeds. You forgot she was out there. Don’t.
Quiet Mystic 