There is an ancient pattern that plays out whenever the sky goes dark. When a plague strikes a village, when a drought wipes out a season’s harvest, when a sudden wall of water sweeps a sleeping summer camp off the map, people ask the same question they have asked since they first stood upright and watched the sun vanish behind the moon: Who did this? Who angered the gods? Who must we blame?
Modern Americans like to think they’ve outgrown that question. In our comfortable age of credentials and podcasts, we prefer the language of rational explanations. We build our confidence on the idea that if something goes wrong, we can trace it neatly to policy, politics, or data. But scratch the surface and you still find the eclipse fear that terrified our ancestors when the sky turned red and the crops failed. It’s the same raw animal dread. It still demands a face. It still wants a single mouth that whispered the curse.
When the devastating Hill Country flood hit Texas this year, that ancient fear burst back through the concrete. A slow-moving storm lingered over the limestone hills until a 30-foot wall of water broke through and drowned a Christian camp in the middle of the night. The National Weather Service, stretched thin after years of budget cuts, did its best to warn people. Some listened, most didn’t — just like they never do until the river comes for them. And yet, in the days that followed, the conversation turned instantly to the same primitive drumbeat: “Trump did this.” The coverage made it sound so tidy: the staff cuts, the reduced resources, the erosion of trust — all leading back to one name, one orange face on the horizon. Trump made the flood. Trump killed those kids.
This is not policy analysis. This is scapegoat logic. It is Ba’al and Moloch and Ra and the jealous Old Testament God of floods and plagues, but dragged screaming into a modern press conference. The so-called secular, rational class — the coastal priesthood of academia, media, and hyper-modern humanists — swear they do not believe in magic. They insist there is no spirit realm, no demon in the whirlwind, no Trickster sun god looming over the harvest. And yet they talk about him as if he is exactly that.
There was once a more innocent name for this void: the God-shaped hole. Old revival preachers spoke of it in gentle language. Humans, they said, are built with a space inside them that must be filled by something greater than themselves. For generations, that was Christ, Allah, the saints, the Groom who promises reunion at the gates of death. It gave people a way to bury the dead with a fragile comfort that chaos was not personal punishment but a mystery wrapped in mercy. The child lost to a flood was called home by God. The crops lost to drought were a test, never random malice.
But the modern secular priesthood does not want that hole. They declared they were above it. They ridiculed the faithful for needing a cosmic father or a Groom waiting beyond the veil. They filled the hole with credentials, moral status, hashtags, identity labels, purity tests. They built whole new tabernacles of rationalism, not realizing the old animal wiring was still buried underneath. The hole stayed. And nature hates a vacuum.
So the fear took a shape. It became what it always becomes when people forget they still need to see a face in the storm: it became a Trickster. A cosmic scapegoat who could be cursed for every unspeakable thing they cannot control. And the name they gave that Trickster was Trump. Not the man himself — not the lumpy, mortal reality of an aging real estate loudmouth from Queens — but the enormous, mythic projection that lives rent-free in their heads. The Trickster Sun God with gold toilets and tiny hands who somehow manipulates floods, suicides, epidemics, Ukraine, Gaza, Texas, and the minds of every citizen too stupid to resist him.
He’s become the Forrest Gump of their apocalypse — but flipped. He’s not the clueless witness drifting through every major event in the background; he’s the nefarious hidden cause they see lurking behind every photo, every flood, every border crisis, every whispered conspiracy. And the catechism never updates. They blamed him for Russia. When the wires ran back to Hillary’s camp, they kept the story. They blamed him for Epstein. For the pandemic. For the storm that swallows the camp in the night. The scapegoat logic sticks because the old fear needs it.
They spent all that psychic energy manifesting the story arc they thought would redeem their bloodline and secure their place in the oral tradition of American righteousness. Every protest, every think piece, every viral post: one more patch sewn onto the great civil rights quilt they believed they were destined to wrap themselves in. The granddaughter of the Selma marcher, the grandson of the man who liberated Auschwitz, the niece of the woman who fought for the pill. Or if their people never did these things, they told themselves they would have. So they had to find that villain — that monster to defeat — to keep the redemption arc alive.
And the Trickster Golem ruined the story. He trampled the final scene. He hijacked all that moral inertia — like a spacecraft slingshotting around a planet’s gravity well — and hurled it back at them. The same psychic energy they thought would deliver a Moonshot to make America the most post-racial, post-binary, post-colonial paradise got absorbed by the Golem’s lurching gait. The villagers who shaped him didn’t just slap clay together as a tool. They breathed him into existence as a flawed champion — a comedic Captain America to stand between their Leave It to Beaver picket fences and the coastal priesthood’s acid rain. Not a savior — but a champion. The Trickster they see is not the Trickster the villagers made.
And maybe the greatest sin of all is that he spoiled the final moral exorcism they thought would make them immortal. Like Kundera’s Immortality, chasing your name in lights too hard makes you absurd. They wanted to be the final liberators, the vanguard who gave every new group a new right, the moon race of intersectional justice, the final defeat of the fascist inside the American genome. And the Trickster’s grotesque grin tramples the scene. So they shout “Cut! Cut! We need to reshoot this!” But the Golem won’t cooperate.
At first, Trump just rented space in their heads. But like bronchitis that starts in the sinuses and drips down into your lungs, the Trickster migrated from mind to heart. They denied they had a God-shaped hole, so they let it be filled with dread. They became accidental Jesus freaks — accidental sun worshipers chanting at an orange disk named SOL, the scientific name for our sun. They turned their heads into pulpits, their hearts into altars, their rage into a cosmic Tulpa they keep alive with every new hashtag and effigy.
Meanwhile, the villagers who made the Golem always knew he was clay. He is their flawed champion — not a god. Not a king. Just a stand-in to guard the garden while the storms rage. And when he cracks, they’ll grind him back to dust and walk away.
If it floods like a god, punishes like a god, and devours like a god — it’s a god. Not for the villagers who built him out of clay — but for the ones who hate him so completely that they can’t stop burning the effigy. They think they’re saving themselves. But they are the ones who keep the fire fed.
The Trump-shaped hole isn’t just in their heads anymore. It migrated straight into the hollow place in their chests where something greater used to live.
And they’ll keep the fire burning.
Amen.
FAQ
Q: What does ‘Trump-shaped hole’ mean?
It’s a modern twist on the idea of the God-shaped hole — a term popular among philosophers and theologians for the idea that humans have an innate space that craves meaning bigger than themselves. In this piece, the idea is that people who claim to be “rational” or “godless” still pour fear and blame into that hole. Their constant obsession with Trump turns him into an accidental Trickster god — not worshipped with praise, but fed with dread.
Q: Are you literally saying Trump is a god?
No — not in the sense of an actual supernatural being. The point is that when people blame one man for every disaster, every storm, every mental health crisis, they give him power like a mythic figure. It’s about the energy and fear they pour into him — the pattern is what’s “god-like.”
Q: What is a Trickster god?
Tricksters appear in myths worldwide — like Loki, Coyote, or Anansi. They cause chaos, challenge order, and test people’s pride. They’re not evil, but they’re unpredictable, and cultures use them to explain why the world isn’t always fair or neat. The essay argues that some people use Trump this way: a single unpredictable villain who explains everything bad.
Q: What does burning effigies have to do with this?
Burning an effigy — a doll or figure that represents someone — is an ancient ritual. People do it to symbolically destroy a threat or evil. The piece argues that when people burn Trump in effigy over and over — giant baby blimps, piñatas, voodoo dolls — they repeat that old ritual. They believe it banishes him, but it can keep him alive in the mind instead.
Q: Why bring up the Hill Country flood?
It’s an example of how tragedy and chaos still get personalized. A flash flood is a natural disaster, but some people immediately blamed Trump for the staff cuts or warnings that fell short. This echoes the ancient impulse to blame floods on an angry god. The piece uses it to show how scapegoat logic survives.
Q: What is a golem?
In Jewish folklore, a golem is a man-shaped figure made from clay to protect a community. It’s strong but mute and can be dismantled when its job is done. The piece says that for Trump’s supporters, he’s like a golem — a crude, disposable protector, not a savior. He stands between them and the elite “priesthood” they feel threatened by.
Q: Why mention Pharisees?
In the Bible, the Pharisees were religious leaders who focused heavily on enforcing ritual purity and judging others. The piece suggests some modern “rational” groups act like secular Pharisees: enforcing moral tests, purity codes, and defining who is “clean” or “unclean.” It’s an old pattern that reappears under new labels.
Q: What do you mean by ‘bad religion’?
Not the band! Here, “bad religion” means unconscious, ritualistic behavior that acts like superstition but pretends it’s rational. Blaming, cursing, or burning effigies can become a “bad religion” when people don’t see that they’re feeding the same fears they claim they’ve outgrown.
Q: What’s a Tulpa?
A tulpa is a thoughtform — a psychic entity created by intense mental focus and belief. The idea comes from Tibetan mysticism but spread in Western esoteric thought. A tulpa can become semi-autonomous in the mind or the collective mind. In this piece, the Trickster is described as an accidental tulpa, fed by fear and ritual blame.
Q: What’s an Egregore?
An egregore is an old occult term for a psychic force created and sustained by a group’s shared emotion and belief. The Trickster functions like an egregore: a group-mind ghost they keep alive because they can’t stop feeding it fear.
Glossary
God-Shaped Hole
A phrase describing the deep, universal human need for meaning bigger than ourselves — often spiritual or religious. When that’s denied, people often fill it with politics, ideologies, or scapegoats.
Trickster
A mythic figure who thrives on disruption and fear — like Loki in Norse myth, Coyote in Native American stories, or Hermes in Greek myth. Tricksters explain why chaos never fully goes away.
Scapegoat
A ritual where a community transfers its guilt or fear onto an innocent figure, then drives them away or kills them to purify the group. The essay argues that constant blame turns Trump into a modern scapegoat.
Effigy
An image, doll, or figure that stands in for someone hated or feared. Destroying it is meant to symbolically destroy the real thing. Historically used in folk magic and protest alike.
Golem
A man-shaped clay figure from Jewish folklore, brought to life to defend the community. Not divine — just a mute tool. The piece uses this to contrast how his supporters see Trump: as a protector, not a god.
Eclipse Fear
The primal terror humans feel when natural order breaks — like sudden darkness during an eclipse. People once blamed eclipses on angry gods. The idea here is that humans still look for faces to blame when chaos hits.
Pharisee
A biblical term for religious leaders obsessed with purity codes and judging moral failings. Used here to show how some modern secular groups repeat the same policing impulse.
Bad Religion
A tongue-in-cheek label for any belief system that becomes a ritual of blame or fear — without awareness. When scapegoating replaces accountability, it acts like superstition.
Ba’al, Moloch, Ra
Examples of ancient gods blamed for storms, floods, and famine. People offered sacrifices to keep them satisfied or to explain disasters. They illustrate how old scapegoat logic works.
Tulpa
A mind-made thoughtform from Tibetan mysticism — an independent entity created by intense focus and belief. Modern occult and pop culture use it to describe an accidental psychic echo that acts real because people feed it fear.
Egregore
An old esoteric term for a collective psychic entity sustained by group thought, emotion, and ritual. A nation, cult, or movement can create an egregore without ever saying its name.
tl;dr
The provided text, titled "The Trump-Shaped Hole," explores the phenomenon of how modern society, despite its embrace of rationality, often reverts to primal "eclipse fear" when confronted with chaos, seeking a singular entity to blame. It argues that for some, the traditional "God-shaped hole," a human need for transcendent meaning, has been filled by an intense, often negative, focus on Donald Trump, inadvertently elevating him to a "Trickster God" or "tulpa"—a mythic projection sustained by fear and blame. The author contrasts this perception with how Trump's supporters view him as a "golem," a mere tool to be used and discarded, highlighting a significant divergence in how he is perceived and the unintended perpetuation of a perceived supernatural entity through collective obsession.
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