Trump was Thwarted at Every Turn

This Tarot card came to mind this morning when I was reviewing the latest (prime time) session of the January 6th Select Committee hearings from last night.

At the top of a steep cliff, a young man, armed with a wand, fights six men who are also armed with wands. It is the image of a person surrounded by hostile elements: at work, at home, in his social life, and even within his inner self, his psyche, or his body. In other words, he is someone racked with serious problems, and the black smoke billowing up into the sky highlights the danger of this. This card symbolizes energy that is being used up, wealth that is being destroyed, or human relationships that are deteriorating.

Tarot of the New Vision

But Trump was so sure that he could overcome defeat by confidently repeating the same lie over and over again, he wouldn’t (and really couldn’t) admit that he had lost the election. The cost of ruined lives for others was enormous. But what has that to do with him?

It’s called hubris.

Hubris (/ˈhjuːbrɪs/; from Ancient Greek ὕβρις (húbris) ‘pride, insolence, outrage’), or less frequently hybris (/ˈhaɪbrɪs/), describes a personality quality of extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance. The term arrogance comes from the Latin adrogare, meaning “to feel that one has a right to demand certain attitudes and behaviors from other people”. To arrogate means “to claim or seize without justification… To make undue claims to having”, or “to claim or seize without right… to ascribe or attribute without reason”. The term pretension is also associated with the term hubris, but is not synonymous with it.

According to studies, hubris, arrogance, and pretension are related to the need for victory (even if it does not always mean winning) instead of reconciliation, which “friendly” groups might promote. Hubris is usually perceived as a characteristic of an individual rather than a group, although the group the offender belongs to may suffer collateral consequences from wrongful acts. Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one’s own competence, accomplishments or capabilities. The adjectival form of the noun hubris/hybris is hubristic/hybristic.

The term hubris originated in Ancient Greek, where it had several different meanings depending on the context. In legal usage, it meant assault or sexual crimes and theft of public property, and in religious usage it meant transgression against a god.

Wikipedia

Here ends today’s lesson.