“A Little Party Never Killed Nobody”: Trump’s Halloween Great Gatsby Party Highlights the Growing Divide Between The Elite and Reality in America
The American Dream is that anyone, from any background, can, with hard work and perseverance, achieve success and social status in the United States.
In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby believes in that dream embodying both its promise and its ultimate failure. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald questions whether the American Dream is attainable and whether the pursuit of wealth can ever lead to happiness, portraying it as an elusive and often destructive force.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson reminded readers that Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel “skewered the immoral and meaningless lives of the very wealthy during the Jazz Age who spent their time throwing extravagant parties and laying waste to the lives of the people around them.”
As millions of Americans face rising health care costs and the loss of food assistance, their president made his indifference plain. On Friday afternoon just eleven hours before the SNAP deadline Trump used his social media to showcase the new marble in a refurbished White House bathroom. Minutes later, he posted again about the “magnificent” marble columns at the Kennedy Center.
After unveiling his marble photos, Trump boarded his plane for Florida to attend a lavish Great Gatsby–themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago. USA Today reported that the event, titled “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody” after the 2013 film’s soundtrack, featured guests in beaded gowns and tuxedos “mimicking Roaring Twenties attire.” An era remembered for its wild decadence, staggering income inequality, and the economic collapse that followed.
Indifference wrapped in luxury, Trump’s critics see him as a Marie Antoinette variant.
The last queen of France before the French Revolution, Antoinette became a symbol of extravagance. She lived in opulence while her people starved, and in 1793 she was executed by guillotine for treason.
Trump, too, has made his fortune a performance. His properties and lifestyle, most notably Mar-a-Lago, have been compared to the opulence of Versailles. Photos and clips online show the president and guests dining and chatting as waiters weave between tables carrying trays of cocktails. Photographs from the event show dancers in lace flapper dresses and feathered headbands.
Ahead of the lapse in federal food aid funding, one Republican congressman, Rep. Clay Higgins, suggested that his struggling constituents should “stop smoking crack” if they wanted to survive the cuts.
From the Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age aristocrats, Marie Antoinette’s Versailles, and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago faithful all share the same flaw: they mistake opulence for meaning.
But eventually every party ends. Whether thats the Great Depression, The French Revolution, or whatever we’ll call this era of Trump history shows the ending won’t be swell.
Until then, good night and good luck.
