Trump Throws "Great Gatsby" Party at Mar-a-Lago as Food Stamps End for Millions

On Friday, President Trump held a lavish Great Gatsby Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, just hours before the estimated 42 million people lost SNAP benefits. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy wrote on social media, The way he rubs his inhumanity in Americans' face never ceases to stun me. He's 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," unquote. And a piece for The Financial Times headlined How Gatsby Foretold Trump's America. The University of London literature professor Sarah Churchwell writes, quote, The novel's prescience lies not in foretelling specific events, but in diagnosing a culture where power enjoys impunity and cruelty rubs out its traces. A society run by careless people, the unheeding brutality of so-called world builders has returned most recently in the dark fantasies of Trumpism and in Silicon Valley's fatuous motto Move Fast and Break Things, she wrote. For more, we go to Montgomery, Alabama, where we're joined by Kirk Kernop, professor and chair of the English department at Troy University. Montgomery is where Zelda Fitzgerald was born. The professor teaches F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great Gatsby, served on the board of the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery, now executive director of the International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society. We thank you so much for being with us. Professor Kirk Kernop, as you saw this party play out in Mar-a-Lago, as millions could literally move into hunger in America, your thoughts? What did the great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, teach us about the times then and perhaps a warning about the times today? Well, I think it's fair to say that those of us who have spent our careers studying F. Scott Fitzgerald were horrified and sort of felt like, Mr. President, you've ruined so much already. Why must you sully the great Gatsby? It's really horrific optics, and it really perpetuates, I think, a misreading of the great Gatsby that troubles many of us. Gatsby is sort of famous for its lavish party scenes, but I think what people often miss is that the entire thrust of the book is to critique that conspicuous consumption and the wastage that goes on in these sorts of events, where all of our values are becoming more and more tenuous. Who in the great Gatsby do you see personifying President Trump, and why? Well, it's very interesting, because for the past 50 years, there's been a tendency to equate presidents with Jay Gatsby. It started with Richard Nixon, believe it or not, in part because the 1974 movie was going on during Watergate. And it usually refers to people who come—the outsider, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. But with Donald Trump, I think we really do have the first instance of a president who is the villain of the novel, Tom Buchanan. And if you could talk about the fact that April was the centennial of the publication of the great Gatsby, what do you see as the enduring message about a society run by careless people? And as you looked at Mar-a-Lago, the millionaires and billionaires around President Trump, your final thoughts? Well, my eyes kind of went to the servers and the people that are working this sort of extravagant party. And they're in the background of Gatsby, too. I see a huge difference, because the people that attended Gatsby's parties were not necessarily rich people. They tended to be people that were interested or sort of drawn to the exuberance of life. And in many ways, they're not unlike Gatsby. So it was a sort of a taste of a life that they probably weren't ever going to get in the real workaday world. When I look at Trump's Mar-a-Lago, it just seems—it seems something right out of the satiricon, which is, you know, a story that Fitzgerald drew from as he was creating the novel. So, it really—there's no irony or no self-critique there as this spectacle is going on. And it just demonstrates, again, that a lot of our great literature can be used for spurious purposes. Kirk Carnut, I want to thank you for being with us, chair of the English department at Troy University, executive director of the International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, joining us from Montgomery, Alabama, the birthplace of Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of the author F. Scott Fitzgerald. And for more of our audience-supported journalism, go to democracynow.org, where you can download our news app, sign up for our newsletter, subscribe to The Daily Podcast and so much more.