When President Joe Biden announced on July 21, after weeks of insisting he would stay in the race, that he would be withdrawing from the presidential election and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the 2024 Democratic candidate, most Americans were at least a little bit surprised. But none were perhaps more so than Amy Tripp, an astrologer who goes by the name Starheal on social media. When the news broke, she was busy seeing clients — but “when I got home that evening and saw what was going on on social media,” she says, “I was like, oh my God. This is crazy.”
Truth be told, she shouldn’t have been surprised — she predicted it. An astrology influencer with nearly 150,000 followers on X, (formerly Twitter), Tripp went viral just a few hours after Biden released his statement withdrawing from the race, when someone resurfaced a tweet she had posted in 2020 postulating that Harris would run for president in 2024. She made the prediction according to Harris’s birth chart, which she calculated according to the date and time of her birth.
“Kamala Harris will be 60 in four years,” Tripp tweeted on August 11, 2020. (Harris is currently 59, but turns 60 Oct. 20.) “I see her running for President in 2024 since this coincides with her Saturn return.” A tweet she posted on July 11, 2024, predicted that July 21 would be the exact date that Biden would step down, further astonishing her followers. “Let her lead the country,” one wrote in a July 21 post next to screengrabs of Tripp’s prophetic tweets, racking up more than 7.4 million views. Another quote-tweeted Tripp’s prediction with the caption, “Astrology girls remain undefeated.”
Since going viral on July 21, Tripp has gained more than 66,000 followers on X, according to SocialBlade — she’s now up to more than 149,000 followers — and she says her schedule for birth-chart readings and consultations is now fully booked until late October. According to Tripp, she learned the news that Biden was dropping out of the race when she saw her old tweets circulating on X. Initially, she did not remember that she had predicted that Harris would run. “I was really shocked. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I did say that,'” she says. “‘That’s crazy.'” The prediction was based on Harris’ Saturn return — i.e., the moment Saturn returns to the position in the sky it was in at the time of someone’s birth — being associated with a “transitional time, where you kind of reap what you sow. So if you’ve been working hard and haven’t been cutting corners, you’ll be rewarded with some kind of recognition,” she says.
Her prediction about Biden withdrawing from the election on July 21, she says, was because that was the date when, according to his birth chart, the full moon — “a time of awareness, when something is revealed” — will be at 29 degrees in Capricorn, a planet that “rules the government and old age.” She’s not as proud of this prediction, though. “That one was actually a lot less impressive,” she says.
Though Tripp’s content is not overtly political, she says she does follow politics. “A lot of what I tweet about is current events, either celebrities or news,” she tells Rolling Stone. “I follow everything that’s going on in the world, pretty much anything I can use as content.”
Knowing this, it’s reasonable for a skeptic to assume that Tripp’s predictions are not the result of a divine astrological gift, but rather of a relatively news-literate individual capitalizing on interest in current events. And indeed, prior to tweeting that Biden would drop out on July 21, there was intense speculation that he would do so following his disastrous performance in the first presidential debate in late June, making the idea that he would drop out sometime in mid-to-late July a pretty good guess.
Regarding her Aug. 11, 2020, tweet predicting Harris would run for president in 2024, Tripp tweeted that the same day Biden selected her as his 2020 running mate, amid mounting concerns that he was too old to run for office. The idea that hers was an educated guess, though perhaps cynical, is also not entirely wrong, Tripp says. “I’m not gonna say I’m not smart and I can’t intuit things,” she says. “Some things are obvious, but I can also look at astrology and pencil in things.” Her predictions are a combination of “feeling how things are gonna move, just based on the energy around them, and then using astrology to confirm it, or vice versa.”
This is not the first time Tripp has gone viral, though largely it has been for less positive reasons. In her X bio, she refers to herself as “the internet’s most notorious astrologer,” and she tells Rolling Stone she has been “canceled” multiple times, including for tweeting Kobe Bryant’s birth chart and George Floyd’s birth chart shortly after their deaths, which many interpreted as callous and opportunistic. In response to being called out for tweeting Floyd and Bryant’s birth charts, Tripp concedes, “now I would wait, because I can read the room more.” But she is also defensive about her multiple cancellations: “All this stuff about getting canceled, it’s taking things too far,” she says. “They’re trying to literally censor you.”
It’s for this reason that Tripp, who says she voted for Biden in 2020, identifies as a political “moderate,” drifting more to the center as a result of her disillusionment with “cancel culture.” Contrary to what her detractors have claimed, she is not a fan of Trump, though she says she is currently dating someone who is a former Trump administration official. (Of her viral Harris tweet, Tripp says her boyfriend is “really proud” of her despite the two having conflicting political views.)
This time, the attention has been largely positive. “It’s nice to go viral for a good thing for once,” Tripp says. Still, she has mixed feelings about it. “People are asking me to predict scores for sports games or asking me about crypto and finance,” she says. “I have no idea about that stuff.” Despite working as a professional astrologer, Tripp says she doesn’t “like feeling like people think I’m all-knowing or omnipotent.”
In terms of the election going forward, Tripp says that she believes Trump will win — a prediction she has made before, and one that she says is rooted in astrology rather than her own personal desires or beliefs. (She says this is because Jupiter will be conjunct his sun — Trump’s ruling planet — and North node during Election Day, with Jupiter being “a planet of expansion, abundance, good fortune.”) But even though she says she will most likely vote for Harris, there is a part of her that hopes she is right about Trump winning.
“Part of me is like, it would affect my business and people would come for me and drag me and it would be really bad for me [if Kamala won],” she says. “But in terms of my beliefs and how I see things in the world, I am more aligned with her.”
David Manheim and Hunter Biden Courtesy of David Manheim