Halloween was an especially scary time this year. The costly government shutdown drags on. Health care premiums are about to explode. SNAP benefits expired this month and people will literally go hungry. However, Donald Trump, who’s responsible for all of this, celebrated the holiday with a Great Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago. Like the Bible, Trump probably hasn’t actually read the book but he might’ve seen at least one of the movies. Still, the overall gathering seemed less Gatsby and more Eyes Wide Shut. (Watch below for the full monty cringe.)
Trump does have a lot in common with Gatsby’s enemy Tom Buchanan, whose wealth and privilege are entirely unearned. Of course, Trump lacks Buchanan’s commanding physical stature that narrator Nick Carraway describes in almost erotic detail: “Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.”
Trump isn’t a powerful tight end like Tom Buchanan, but he’s just as much a priggish, entitled bully. You can easily imagine Trump breaking a woman’s nose. It’s not long after readers have met Tom that he goes off on a racist rant suitable for a Trump rally. (Watch below, though you’re better off reading the quoted text.)
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
This scene is shockingly prescient. The Rise of the Coloured Empires is a riff on Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy (1920). The Harvard-educated Stoddard warned that accelerating population growth among people of color and industrialization in China and Japan were existential threats to white supremacy. He advocated restricting non-white immigration to white-majority nations, and like Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and Tucker Carlson, he seemed obsessed with the imagined “uncleanness” of brown immigrants.
The passage is also commonly misinterpreted. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald is hardly making a “woke” stand against white supremacy. Yes, Tom is a racist asshole, but Nick doesn’t necessary think he’s boorish solely because he’s racist. Nick himself makes casually racist remarks, most notably when he see a limousine “driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.” (The 2013 Baz Luhrmann fever dream version whitewashes Nick’s bigoted sentiments.)
Nick thinks Tom is a paranoid idiot, latching onto racist conspiracies because he’s bored. Tom might as well have interrupted dinner to discuss alien abductions. Nick can’t imagine a nightmarish future where the “colored races” are running the show. When confronted with an upset in the racial hierarchy, he literally laughs out loud. This is how many liberals have responded over the years to their MAGA loved ones. Jon Stewart remarked recently that he has an uncle to the “right of Attila the Hun” but he still humors him at Thanksgiving dinner and claims he’s a “three-dimensional human being who has qualities that I really admire.” Nick doesn’t reject Tom because he’s a racist lout. Nick ends their friendship over his treatment of Gatsby and, to a lesser degree, George Wilson, the white working-class dupe who Tom repeatedly screws over. He’s also screwing his wife, Myrtle, but dismisses George as any real threat to him because “he’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.”
Trump’s racist rants and policies are too often minimized as simple fear mongering or deliberate distractions. But cultural resentment is what truly motivates Trump.
Conservative Never Trumper Tom Nichols at The Atlantic has described the MAGA movement as comprising “bored middle-class narcissists who yearn for some sort of dramatic crusade to give meaning to their empty lives.” Nick similarly condemns the “careless” Tom, Daisy, and Jordan (though they are several tax brackets removed from comfortably middle-class). Nichols also distinguishes between MAGA voters and the Republican “elites” who can’t stand them.
Tom sounds like a typical Fox News anchor when he warns his fellow rich white people: “Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.” Jordan replies simply, “We’re all white here.”
Jordan Baker’s quip is one of my favorite lines, even if obviously racist, because it reveals so much about her character. She feels invulnerable in her status and privilege, while Tom feels the proverbial “colored” wolf at the door. Nick dismisses Buchanan’s remarks as “impassioned gibberish,” but not because he is racially tolerant. He just thinks Tom is absurd.
However, there is a key difference between Donald Trump and Tom Buchanan. Tom would never have thrown that garish party. Gatsby is so insecure that he flaunts his ill-gotten wealth and regularly throws large gatherings for guests who are only interested in what they can take from him. Tom views the whole vulgar spectacle with barely disguised contempt. So does Daisy Buchanan, for whom the entire “caravansary” is intended to impress.
“Who is this Gatsby anyhow?” demanded Tom suddenly. “Some big bootlegger?”
“Where’d you hear that?” I inquired.
“I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know.”
“Not Gatsby,” I said shortly.
He was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the drive crunched under his feet.
“Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie together.”
Trump doesn’t really pretend to love anyone but himself, so he’s not reaching for any elusive green light when he pimps out the Lincoln bathroom and litters the Oval Office with tawdry gold baubles. The massive ballroom he’s constructing is merely a monument to his own vanity.
Tom scoffs at Gatsby’s flashy pink suit and his “circus wagon” of a car. Later, during the climactic scene at the Plaza Hotel, Tom says, “I know I’m not very popular. I don’t give big parties. I suppose you’ve got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends—in the modern world.”
Tom Buchanan triumphs over Jay Gatsby when he releases his version of the Epstein files. Daisy Buchanan represents an American electorate that might have enjoyed Gatsby’s flash but rejected him when confronted with his lack of substance.
Donald Trump is Jay Gatsby with all his corruption but none of his romanticism. He’s also Tom Buchanan with all his simple-minded brutality but without his secure position in polite society. The nation’s George Wilsons might eventually turn on Trump, leaving him floating in a pool of his own moral depravity, and when that happens, most of those Mar-a-Lago partygoers won’t bother to mourn. Though I fear Ezra Klein, like Nick Carraway, will insist Trump “turned out all right in the end.”
I feel like the carelessness is their entire point all the time now. It’s not that the people holding their noses and voting for Trump did or didn’t want what we’ve got, I leave that to their consciences. What they really wanted was to stop having to engage with the world as it is or morality as it is. They wanted to feel perpetually on vacation, turning the AC down to 62F in a hotel room in a 100F climate, ordering steak every day and be damned to their cardiologist, believing that they’ve found the magical way to keep doing whatever they’d like, believing their donations to charity or fundraising actions will counteract their great sin. These are the people who fueled the growth of indulgences in the Middle Ages. If something is good for business, it’s good for the country - no matter whether it was even good for the business and not just for them.
I’m so tired of them living in a fantasy world and making choices within that world that wreck the actual world.
It really is remarkable that Trump is so devoid of any good quality that even when comparing him to fictional villains he comes out worse.
“At least Tom Buchanan has read a book and doesn’t feel the need to buy admiration with fancy parties.”
“At least Dracula paid his legal bills.”
“At least the clown from It could form complete sentences.”