President Trump has lengthy acknowledged that he doesn’t learn books, so maybe he’s by no means cracked the backbone of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Nice Gatsby.” However hasn’t he seen one of many a number of motion pictures? Does he actually not know that Gatsby is a tragedy about class, extra and hubris?
It appears not. On Halloween, there was Trump, dressed as himself, internet hosting a Gatsby-themed celebration at his Gatsby-era Mar-a-Lago property. The president was recent from a diplomatic tour of Asia throughout which he’d swept up an array of golden presents (a crown!) from heads of state paying tribute in hopes of not paying tariffs.
Trump’s arriving company, costumed as Roaring ’20s flappers, bootleggers and pre-crash tycoons, handed a scantily clad lady seductively writhing in a large Champagne glass, then entered his gilded ballroom beneath an indication in Artwork Deco script saying the evening’s theme: “A little bit celebration by no means killed no one.”
That’s the title of a music from the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 movie tackle Gatsby, the latest. Maybe Trump is unaware that within the wake of the fictional Gatsby’s personal debauched celebration, three folks died, together with Gatsby.
The tone-deaf Trump confronted a comeuppance far in need of tragedy after his celebration, however painful nonetheless: a blue wave in Tuesday’s elections. Revulsion at his imperial presidency swamped Republican candidates and causes.
The obvious ignorance of Mr. Make America Nice Once more about one of many nice American novels, now in its centennial 12 months, wasn’t the worst of Trump’s weekend present of extra. This was: The president of america held courtroom at Mar-a-Lago, amid free-flowing liquor and tables laden with meals, hours earlier than federal meals assist would finish for 42 million People. In the meantime, greater than 1 million federal workers have been furloughed or labored with out pay amid a five-week-old authorities shutdown, a few of them becoming a member of beforehand fired public servants at meals banks. The web Folks journal juxtaposed a photograph of Trump surveying his Palm Seaside celebration with a shot of close by Miamians in a meals line.
The president, who for practically 10 months has seized powers he doesn’t have beneath federal regulation and the Structure, professed to be all however powerless to avert the vitamin help cutoff, regardless of two federal judges’ rulings that he achieve this. And, characteristically, he claimed to be innocent concerning the shutdown that provoked the vitamin disaster.
“It’s their fault,” Trump mentioned of congressional Democrats as he flew to Mar-a-Lago for the fete. “The whole lot is their fault. It’s so simply solved.”
How? Why, Democrats should bend the knee, after all. They have to abandon their quest to get Trump and Republicans to reverse their Medicaid cuts and to increase Obamacare subsidies for the working poor. At the same time as Mr. Artwork of the Deal claims (falsely) to have settled eight wars, bargaining even with Hamas, he’s refused to barter with Democrats. The shutdown is now the longest ever, on Tuesday surpassing the 35-day report Trump set in his first time period.
There’s extra.
En path to Florida aboard Air Drive One, the presidential aircraft that Trump is changing with a very royal jet, a present from Qatar, and having left behind the ruins of the East Wing the place his $300-million ballroom will rise, Trump took to social media to boast of his newest mission within the Mar-a-Lago-fication of the White Home: an all-marble and gold do-over of the toilet adjoining the Lincoln Bed room. “Extremely polished, Statuary marble!” he crowed, sending two dozen pictures in a sequence of posts. Trump wrote that the earlier Nineteen Forties-era toilet “was completely inappropriate for the Lincoln Period,” however his modifications fastened that.
“Artwork Deco doesn’t go together with, you recognize, 1850 and civil wars and all the issues,” he’d advised rich donors final month. “However what does is statuary marble. So I ripped it aside and we constructed the toilet. It’s completely attractive and completely in line with that point.”
And with that, Trump once more confirmed his ignorance of America’s historical past in addition to its literature. That mentioned, the brand new toilet is extra enticing than the one at Mar-a-Lago through which Trump stashed containers of presidency paperwork, together with top-secret papers, after his first time period.
Trump’s lust for energy and its trappings appears to have made him blind to dangerous optics and deaf to the dissonance of his utterances. The politician who’s gotten a lot credit score — and received two of three presidential elections — for talking to working-class People’ grievances now appears fully out of contact. There’s additionally his household’s open accrual of wealth, particularly in crypto, and Trump’s latest demand for $230 million from the ever-accommodating Justice Division, to compensate him for the previous authorized circumstances towards him for preserving authorities paperwork and making an attempt to reverse his 2020 defeat.
All of this whereas People’ prices of residing stay excessive, persons are out of jobs due to his insurance policies and longtime residents, together with some residents, are swept up in his immigrant detentions and deportations, sundering households.
This week’s election outcomes aren’t the one factor that means Trump is lastly paying a value. So did the discharge of a number of polls timed for the primary anniversary of his reelection. Regardless of Trump’s claims on the contrary, his job approval scores are the bottom because the ignominious finish of his first time period. Majorities oppose his dealing with of most points, together with those — the economic system and immigration — that helped elect him.
The narrator in “The Nice Gatsby” famously says of two central characters, “They have been careless folks, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up issues and creatures after which retreated again into their cash or their huge carelessness, or no matter it was that stored them collectively, and let different folks clear up the mess that they had made.”
I’m trying ahead to the day when the careless Trump is gone and his mess could be cleaned up — together with all that gold defiling the Folks’s Home.
Bluesky: @jackiecalmesThreads: @jkcalmesX: @jackiekcalmes
