March 25, 2020

I Made a Trump Astrology Twitter Bot, and It’s Scaring Me How Funny and Accurate It Is

Of course he’s a Gemini.

Mother Jones illustration; Ron Sachs/CNP via Zuma, Andy Holmes/Unsplash, Reign Abarintos/Unsplash

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Donald Trump is a man of conflict and contradiction—a Gemini with a Leo Rising and a Sagittarius Moon, to be precise. I have no idea what that means but, according to Cosmopolitan, Geminis are meant to be “fast, witty and super into communications.” Insider is blunter: Geminis are two-faced liars and poor listeners who constantly repeat themselves.

Can astrology decode the day-to-day behavior of our Gemini-in-chief? No, of course it can’t, but I’ve made a Trump horoscope Twitter bot anyway because why the hell not. Follow along: @trumpstrology.

Here’s what I did: I coded a bot that tweets Gemini horoscopes from an open-source dataset, paired alongside a top-trending news story of the day. 

Over the past few weeks, I let my little bot run autonomously behind a locked account while I finessed the code. Since late December, it’s been ingesting viral news articles and matching horoscopes in an attempt to explain all sorts of things: Trump’s bizarre impeachment-acquittal speech, his dismissals of the coronavirus emergency, his hatred of energy-efficient light bulbs.

Some of the @trumpstrology horoscopes track alongside real-life events with supernatural perfection. Many other pairings are so-so. And then you get the misfires. To find their meaning, it takes a bit of work to stitch together some dissonant data points—which often reveal the most poignant prophecies. (Just like astrology itself!)

Yet each one of those misfires serves as a reminder—that summoning the infinite power of the cosmos can still be insufficient to explain whatever the hell our president is doing half the time.

To see what the stars—and Trump—will bring tomorrow, follow @trumpstrology on Twitter.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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