The Great Gatsby in the Valley of Ashes: A Critique of Power in Trump’s America
On the night that the federal safety net was deliberately torn for millions of its most vulnerable citizens, Donald Trump threw a party. At his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida - a palace of gilded Rococo revival where membership fees serve as a gatekeeper against the common herd - guests arrived in a shimmering parade of nostalgia. There were sequined flapper dresses, pinstripe suits, and feather boas, all meticulously curated to evoke the decadent glamour of the Roaring Twenties. Champagne, that timeless lubricant of the elite, flowed in ceaseless streams. A jazz band swelled, filling the air with the syncopated rhythms of a bygone era. The theme for this Halloween night spectacle was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus, The Great Gatsby, and its tagline, borrowed from a song in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film adaptation and repeated like an incantation across a flurry of social media clips, was as revealing as it was callous: “A little party never killed nobody” (The Independent, 2025).
Except, of course, it does. A little party, of this specific kind, at this specific moment, is an act of political violence. It is a declaration of indifference so profound it borders on contempt. Because while the guests, a coterie of political allies, family members, and MAGA-aligned celebrities, toasted their host under glittering chandeliers, the legislative machinery in Washington D.C. had ground to a halt, and with it, the flow of vital food assistance. As of November 1, 2025, just hours after the party’s last champagne flute was drained, 42 million Americans, including millions of children, the elderly, and the disabled, saw their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits vanish overnight (Farrow and Pereira, 2025). The cause was a protracted government shutdown, yet the president chose to mark the occasion not with a sober address to the nation or a late-night negotiation session, but with a costume ball celebrating the very culture of careless excess that Fitzgerald so masterfully condemned. In the stark moral landscape of Trump’s America, there is no longer any room for subtlety in the performance of power. The cruelty is the point, and the spectacle is its stage.
Act I: The Party as Political Manifesto
It would be a comforting illusion to dismiss Trump’s Gatsby night as merely a clumsy, tone-deaf blunder; an unfortunate lapse in judgment from a man not known for his grasp of literary symbolism. But to do so would be to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of his political project. This was not ignorance, but a deliberate message, a carefully constructed piece of political theatre, and the choice of the Jazz Age aesthetic was not accidental. It was a deliberate embrace of an era defined by its intoxicating blend of conspicuous consumption, rampant speculation, and profound moral decay. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s lavish parties are not symbols of communal joy but of a deep spiritual rot, the frantic, last dance of a society teetering on the brink of an economic and moral crash. Trump, in a move of audacious self-awareness, took Fitzgerald’s cautionary tale and refashioned it as a self-portrait.
He has always understood, on a visceral level, the power of wealth not just to procure comfort, but to humiliate and dominate those without it. His golden towers, his failed casinos, his reality-television persona, all are manifestations of what the sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen, in his seminal 1899 treatise The Theory of the Leisure Class, identified as “conspicuous consumption.” Veblen argued that for the emergent leisure class, the public display of wealth was not a byproduct of their status but its primary function. Luxury, in this formulation, is not about personal enjoyment but about establishing social distance and asserting superiority (Veblen, 1899). By staging his own Gatsby party on the very night that the nation’s social safety net was being shredded, Trump was embodying his most deeply held creed. It was a live-action demonstration of his belief that the ultimate privilege of wealth is the freedom to be utterly indifferent to the suffering of others.
The spectacle was meticulously crafted for maximum impact, designed to be broadcast. One viral video, which spread rapidly across social media platforms, showed a performer, clad in a bikini and draped with a feather boa, swirling languidly inside a giant, illuminated martini glass while guests, including the president himself, cheered and filmed her on their phones (The Times of India, 2025). This was power made flesh, the objectification of a human being into a living ornament for the wealthy to gaze upon. The scene carried a disquieting and unavoidable echo of the moral vacuum that has haunted the highest echelons of wealth and power, a reminder that such ostentatious displays of opulence often exist in unsettling proximity to the darkest forms of exploitation and decay. It was a performance that seemed to revel in its own potential for scandal, daring the public to be outraged.
Act II: “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody”
The lyric, taken from the musician Fergie’s contribution to the soundtrack of Luhrmann’s 2013 film, is intended as a throwaway line of hedonistic fun, a modern gloss on the Jazz Age’s reckless spirit. But transplanted into the political context of a government shutdown and a looming hunger crisis, it becomes a chilling anthem of cruelty. “A little party never killed nobody.” It is a phrase that drips with the casual, unthinking privilege of those for whom consequences are an abstraction. Tell that to the single mother standing at a grocery store checkout, her heart pounding as she prays her SNAP card isn’t declined in front of a line of impatient shoppers. Tell it to the elderly couple who rely on that assistance to supplement a meagre fixed income, now forced to choose between medication and a hot meal. Tell it to the millions of children for whom a school lunch might be the only reliable source of nutrition, a source now jeopardised by the very political gamesmanship that allowed this party to proceed without a hint of shame.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago fête, held just hours before the legislative authority for SNAP funding officially expired, was not a matter of unfortunate timing but a deliberate performance of triumph. The cruelty was the point. This has been a consistent, if often misunderstood, feature of his political methodology. Where traditional politicians might seek to soften the blow of unpopular policies with empathetic rhetoric, Trump revels in the opposite. Every reduction of social care is framed as an act of strength, a necessary pruning of the ‘handouts’ that supposedly foster dependency. Every ostentatious spectacle of wealth serves as a reassurance to his followers that they, too, might one day ascend to a level of power where they can be the ones to dispense cruelty, rather than receive it. The outrage generated by such acts is not an unintended consequence; it is the desired outcome, a political currency that energises his base and dominates the media cycle.
The condemnation from his political opponents was swift, predictable, and ultimately, part of the performance. California Governor Gavin Newsom, a frequent and vocal critic, captured the sentiment in a post on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter): “Donald Trump hosted a Great Gatsby party while SNAP benefits were about to disappear for 42 million Americans. He does not give a damn about you” (The Independent, 2025). Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, another prominent Democratic voice, expressed a sense of weary astonishment at the brazenness of the display. “The way he rubs his inhumanity in Americans’ face never ceases to stun me,” he wrote, adding that Trump was “illegally refusing to pay food stamp benefits…while he throws a ridiculously over the top Gatsby party for his right wing millionaire and corporate friends” (The Independent, 2025). The White House, in turn, met this criticism not with contrition or explanation, but with a dismissive sneer. A spokesperson, Anna Kelly, told reporters that the Democrats were “full of it,” and that President Trump had “consistently called on them to do the right thing and reopen the government” (Farrow and Pereira, 2025). This exchange, played out across news sites and social media, is the familiar, toxic feedback loop of American politics in the 21st century. But Trump thrives on this outrage. Each scandal, each accusation of inhumanity, only serves to reaffirm his carefully cultivated mythology: that he is the outlaw elite, the disruptive force who breaks the rules of a corrupt establishment to prove they never mattered in the first place. For him, the disgust of his opponents is simply applause by another name, a confirmation that his performance is hitting its mark.
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Act III: The Predator Class Unmasked
History has always known its predators, its gilded aristocracies who feast while the masses starve. The image of Queen Marie Antoinette, apocryphally suggesting cake for the breadless peasants of France, has echoed through centuries as the ultimate symbol of elite detachment. The robber barons of America’s first Gilded Age built their Newport mansions on the backs of exploited labourers. The financiers of Wall Street toasted their bonuses with champagne in 2008, even as the global economy they had gambled into ruin was collapsing, wiping out the savings of millions. What feels different in the twenty-first century, however, is the erosion of shame. The predators have stopped pretending to be ashamed. They no longer feel the need to hide their contempt for the poor behind a veneer of philanthropic concern or civic duty; they broadcast it live, for all the world to see.
The Mar-a-Lago Gatsby party was a formal declaration that shame, as a political constraint, is obsolete. It was a calculated test, almost theological in its cynicism, of the public’s capacity for outrage: how much can they flaunt, how much can they take, before the people revolt? The answer, it seems, is endlessly. Trump’s America represents the purest fulfilment of the theories of the French philosopher Guy Debord, who, in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, argued that modern life was no longer about living, but about having, and then, about appearing. In the society of the spectacle, authentic social life is replaced by its representation. Image supplants reality. And in this context, cruelty itself can become a form of performance art. The Gatsby ball was the metaverse of moral collapse, a virtual reality of decadence where optics matter more than ethics, and empathy is a devalued currency, replaced by the fleeting, addictive hit of virality.
Every smartphone held aloft, every camera flash capturing the shimmering champagne towers and the sequined dancers, was an act of participation in this ritual. Power in the age of the spectacle does not just exploit; it demands to be seen exploiting. To be seen is to dominate. The hunger, the desperation, the quiet panic unfolding in kitchens and at checkout counters across the USA - these are invisible worlds, lacking the seductive glamour of the spectacle. And that is precisely the point. The predator class understands, intuitively, that in a media-saturated culture, what isn’t filmed, what doesn’t trend, what can’t be condensed into a shocking headline or a viral clip, might as well not exist. The suffering of the 42 million is rendered abstract, a statistic lost in the noise, while the image of a woman dancing in a martini glass is concrete, immediate, and endlessly shareable.
Act IV: The Valley of Ashes
In Fitzgerald’s novel, the journey between the glittering, new-money estates of West Egg and the bustling, amoral metropolis of New York City requires passage through a place he calls the “valley of ashes.” It is a desolate, grey, and moribund landscape of industrial refuse, a place where “ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.” Presiding over this wasteland are the giant, fading, and disembodied eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, painted on a forgotten billboard, which “brood on over the solemn dumping ground.” This valley of ashes is the novel’s conscience, the place where the hidden costs of the elite’s careless extravagance are made manifest. It is the dumping ground for the externalities of industrial capitalism, and the home of the working class who are consumed by it. Today, in Trump’s America, that valley of ashes is home to the 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP to feed their families. It is the unseen landscape of food insecurity, of quiet desperation, of lives lived in the long shadow of the spectacle.
Trump’s party was a deliberate and defiant retreat into the hermetically sealed, self-referential world of West Egg, a conscious turning away from the valley of ashes that his own policies and political priorities had helped to expand. The SNAP cuts, cynically sold to the public as a matter of fiscal discipline and a necessary corrective to a culture of dependency, were, in reality, a piece of moral theatre; a ritual humiliation of the vulnerable, designed to reinforce the narrative that poverty is a personal failing, not a systemic one. The rich perform their abundance to justify their own dominance, while the poor are told to be grateful for the discipline of austerity. And at the centre of this perverse morality play, the president clinks his glass, flashes a grin for the cameras, and basks in the knowledge that even his most ardent enemies cannot look away. He commands their attention, and in the economy of the spectacle, attention is the ultimate form of power.
This is the great moral inversion of our age: cruelty is mistaken for charisma, vulgarity is mistaken for authenticity, and a profound lack of empathy is rebranded as strength. It is not, as some might argue, a matter of simple indifference. It is an active, calculated performance. The obscener the contrast between the opulence within the gates and the suffering without, the stronger and clearer the signal becomes: We can do this, and you can do nothing. It is a raw assertion of power, stripped of all its civilizing pretences, and it is a message that resonates deeply with a segment of the populace who feel that they, too, have been left behind in the valley of ashes, and who see in Trump’s shameless cruelty a vicarious form of revenge.
Act V: The Elegy of Decadence
Fitzgerald’s great and enduring insight was not simply that decadence is immoral, but that it is, at its core, profoundly empty. The tragedy of Jay Gatsby is not his criminality but his hollowness. He builds a colossal palace, a monument to new money, not for his own pleasure, but to capture the attention of a woman who, in his mind, represents a past he can reclaim and a status he can attain. His dream is not of wealth itself, but of what he believes wealth can buy: love, acceptance, and the erasure of his humble origins. It is a dream that is ultimately revealed to be an illusion, built on a foundation of romantic fantasy. Trump’s version of the Gatsby dream is both more sinister and more vacuous. He builds his palaces not to impress a long-lost love, but to prove that others can never attain his level of dominance. His is not a personal, aspirational dream, however misguided; it is a public spectacle of exclusion. Gatsby wanted to join the club; Trump wants to own it, burn it down, and sell the insurance claim.
And yet, there is something undeniably haunting about this whole affair, this theatre of decline performed without a shred of irony or self-awareness. It is not just about Trump. He is not the cause, but the most grotesque symptom of a deeper cultural malady. He is the product of a system that has elevated celebrity above substance, wealth above wisdom, and outrage above reason. He is the reflection of a culture that still, despite everything, tunes in for the show. The spectacle is mutual. His audience, a vast and fractured coalition of the adoring and the appalled, hates him, loves him, despises what he stands for - and yet, they cannot turn away. He is the car crash from which we cannot avert our gaze, the reality show that has consumed reality itself. Perhaps that is the truest and most damning reflection of our time: a culture of endless attention without consequence, of perpetual outrage without meaningful action.
The Final Toast: A Wake for a Dying Order
Perhaps, in the end, we have misread the invitation. This was not a party. It was a wake.
It was a frantic, glittering, and ultimately hollow ritual held at the deathbed of an era. This is the death knell for this specific, bloated version of American capitalism: the one built on spectacle, shamelessness, and a profound disconnection from material reality. The jazz swells not in celebration, but to drown out the rattling cough of a dying system. The champagne flows not to toast a vibrant future, but to numb the senses against the stench of decay. This is not a display of confidence; it is a performance of fear.
And here is the secret that lies beneath the noise and the glitter: they know it. The hosts of this morbid affair, the predators who have gorged themselves on the carcass of the public good, can feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. They sense that the foundations of their power, built on illusion, division, and the relentless privatization of dignity, are cracking. Their frantic revelry is the behaviour of a class that knows it’s time is running out, that the moral and economic contradictions of their rule are becoming unsustainable. They party with such performative abandon because they are trying to convince themselves, above all others, that the end is not as near as it feels.
But we know it, too. We, the observers of the valley of ashes, see the spectacle not as a sign of their enduring power, but as a symptom of their terminal decline. The end may not come just yet. The mess that Fitzgerald’s careless people made still needs to be cleaned up, and the cost is still being counted in the quiet desperation of millions. But the prophecy of this party is not one of eternal dominance. It is one of inevitable collapse. The hunger remains, but it is now joined by a growing, defiant certainty. This, too, shall pass. The champagne bubbles burst, but the dawn is coming.
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References
Farrow, F. and Pereira, I. (2025) ‘Trump hosted ‘Great Gatsby’ Halloween party hours before SNAP funding lapsed’, ABC News, 4 November. Available at: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-hosted-great-gatsby-halloween-party-hours-snap/story?id=127091016 [Accessed: 4 November 2025].
The Independent (2025) ‘Trump slammed for lavish Gatsby-themed Halloween party as vital food funding lapses for millions of Americans’, The Independent, 3 November. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-halloween-party-gatsby-snap-funding-b2856896.html [Accessed: 4 November 2025].
The Times of India (2025) ‘Viral video of woman in bikini dancing in giant Martini glass at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago party stirs row: ‘Full Epstein Island vibes’’, The Times of India, 3 November. Available at: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/viral-video-of-woman-in-bikini-dancing-in-giant-martini-glass-at-trumps-mar-a-lago-party-stirs-row-full-epstein-island-vibes/articleshow/125063207.cms [Accessed: 4 November 2025].
Veblen, T. (1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: The Macmillan Company.