This year, 2025, marks the hundredth anniversary of the release of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” a book that many of us were required to read in high school but that makes more and more sense if you go back and read it as an adult. That’s especially true in today’s political climate.
The core message of the novel is that the pursuit of endless wealth ultimately leads to unhappiness, and that the glamorous, elusive party boy Jay Gatsby was not someone you should look up to. He was not the hero.
Donald Trump is clearly not much of a reader, so maybe it is not that surprising — though painfully and grossly ironic — that Oct. 31, with the federal government still shut down and SNAP benefits about to be cut off, leaving about 42 million Americans without a reliable source of food, he was hosting a “Great Gatsby” themed party at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, one of the most powerful men in the world, surrounded by glitz and glamour as the nation he is responsible for falls apart.
At first glance, the irony in his choice of theme may seem surface-level, but if we dive a bit deeper, we will see that there are many chilling similarities and connections to modern-day America and the classic novel.
The 1920s are an era trademarked by the pursuit of extraordinary wealth and little to no regulation. The shocking ratio of wealth disparity displayed in that time isn’t so shocking to us now, in the current economic climate of America, where about two-thirds of the total wealth in the United States is owned by the top 10%of earners, while the bottom 50% only own 2.5% of the total wealth.
Recalling how the luxurious 1920s ended — with a stock market crash that triggered a nation-wide depression — it’s hard to believe the 2020s will end any differently.
The story of Gatsby takes place in 1922, when Republican Warren G. Harding was in office. The year prior to the publication of the novel, immigration quotas went into effect that drastically limited the numbers of Southern European and Jewish people allowed into the U.S.; Now, 100 years later, immigration policies have only become more strict, discriminatory and dehumanizing.
In the U.S., we are seeing indications of a stock market bubble with the rise of AI. People in Cleveland and many other cities are standing in long lines for food as SNAP runs out. Inequality and discrimination is rampant. Healthcare costs get high and higher.
In the ongoing similarities between “The Great Gatsby” and the Trump administration, we see many of those similarities are between the president and Gatsby himself. The infamous character is a pathetic, lonely man driven by greed and his obsession with recreating a past that no longer exists and never existed in the way he sees it. Trump embodies this character’s worst qualities with his greed and endless efforts to set us back as a country.
Trump’s extreme tone-deafness and unethical behavior is nothing new, but as it is so blatantly obvious in him throwing a party like this, it seems that the president simply doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about how any of this makes him look, in fact, it’s more likely he is purposefully provoking controversy for his own benefit. His outrageous behavior is absolutely intentional and meant to distract from things such as the people who have vanished without a trace after being detained by ICE or his handling of the investigation into Jeffery Epstein.
With the similarities between the rise and fall of the roaring 20s and our own roaring 20s approaching the same fate, the final words of “The Great Gatsby” are unfortunately all the more relevant today: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The Trump administration is setting us back — 100 years.
