Field Note 1.3 (b): The Ratatoskr Files
A Tale of Two Tricksters
Recently, we’ve witnessed two mythic tricksters — Trump and Musk — battling not with banjos, but with social media posts, each vying for control of the cultural script.
The greatest blow came when Musk claimed that Trump’s administration had failed to release the Epstein files because Trump himself was named in them. Not a good look. The post was explosive — but what followed was more revealing.
On Air Force One, Trump responded with an almost eerie calm. He said he hadn’t given Musk much thought, that he’d been busy with more important affairs, and that he wished him “well.”
But the camera caught more than his words. And what it caught, the media tends to overlook. We joke about his makeup — and with good reason. It’s absurd. But as observers, we do well to pause when the laughter subsides, and consider what this profound psychological reflex — laughter — reveals. We do, after all, closely associate the fool with the philosopher.
In that eerie calm, I noticed something else: Trump’s makeup looked unusually thick — hastily, heavily, even desperately applied. Beneath his white, performative hat, he hid his face. Something deep inside had been hit.
Have you ever sat in a room, looked up, and noticed a light fixture swaying — the subtle sign that a seismic event has passed, that somewhere deep beneath you, a fault has shifted?
Think of Trump’s makeup as a kind of seismogram — registering a tremor in his earthen heart. And what I read in that cryptic, caked-on mask wasn’t guilt. It wasn’t anger.
It was shame.
Now, reading this seismogram, we have to distinguish guilt from shame. Guilt means regret — the presence of conscience. But shame? Shame isn’t about something you’ve done. It’s about who you are.
And on this day, the foundation of Trump’s mask looked like the foundational kind — the kind laid down in childhood, to shield a boy from his authoritarian father’s cold, unforgiving, omnipresent glare, a terrible god-like glare from ten thousand feet above.
Musk didn’t just bruise Trump’s ego. He struck the central wound — the narcissistic wound — the buried source of shame upon which the president has built his compensatory persona: bold, brash, even bulletproof.
But what happens when, under immense pressure, that persona begins to slip — not just crack, but fracture — along its oldest, deepest fault line?
What happens when the man who achieved near-dictatorial power finds himself mocked again — as he once was, as he always feared — and reawakens that helpless boy beneath his father’s rule?
What happens when Musk’s blows land not on the man, but on the boy inside — and in some dark, subterranean chamber, begin to echo the most terrifying, unholy of rhetorical questions:
Who’s your daddy?
Behind the caked-on mask, the fire rages. Pressure builds. And if he blows — if shame overtakes the performance — the fallout won’t just singe one man’s legacy.
It could burn through the body politic itself.
Editorial Note (June 10, 2025): Shortly after this piece was written, Trump took the extraordinary step of nationalizing California’s National Guard and deploying Marines against the governor’s wishes. This heavy-handed move underscores the dangerous impulsivity and reactive nature we examined here — the “injury” and lashing out embedded in Trump’s psyche, along with his need to mask multiple shortcomings: criticism of his “Big Beautiful Bill,” failures of his trade war, and his fallout with Musk. These developments bring fresh urgency to the questions raised in this Field Note.
Have you ever seen someone’s mask slip — and sensed the rage hiding just behind it? Share your thoughts below.
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🗂️Chapter 1 Index: Standing in The Ancient Shadow