Donald Trump's Great Gatsby–style party at Mar-a-Lago reveals everything about modern America — excess at the top, hunger at the bottom, and the deliberate cruelty of power without care. As millions faced cuts to essential payments, Trump partied. This is what happens when power forgets compassion.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
There's a theme developing on this channel at the moment, and it's all about the unaffordability of the wealthy. And if we want an example of that, go and have a look at some of the pictures of Donald Trump partying in Mar-a-Lago last weekend at a supposed Great Gatsby lookalike party that he hosted there.
It's obscene; wealth was on display, and so was abuse.
Notice how many black people there are in the photographs you can find.
Notice how racially divided that party was as a consequence, in a country where there are a significant number of people who are both black and brown.
Notice how young women were treated as if none of the lessons from Epstein had been learned.
Notice how this was all about ostentatious display of wealth, just as Gatsby was, of course.
It's as if everything that Scott Fitzgerald wrote all those years ago, a century ago now, has not been learned.
And of course, we know what happened very soon after F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing. The 1929 crash followed the era about which he wrote most of all, which was the 1920s and the hype amongst the wealthy following the First World War.
Trump is creating that hype. He's putting forward that illusion, and he's doing so on the back of poor Americans.
And we know that's true. How do we know it's true? That's because last weekend, while Trump was partying, millions and millions of Americans were facing the possibility that their Social Security payments - the SNAP program payments that support them in buying their basic essentials for life, including food - might not have been paid because of the close down by the Republicans of the government in Washington that has meant that these payments have been put in jeopardy.
Now - we know now - but we didn't know last weekend, that 50% of those sums might be paid. But even so, just imagine it; whilst Trump is partying and celebrating excess, millions of Americans who have literally no margin for error in their household budgets are suffering a reduction in one of their critical payments that makes it possible for them to feed their children.
That is the reality of the world that Trump is creating. The heartless, the cruel, the people who dominate the scenes, and who believe that they are of worth, are willing to punish those whom they think are worthless to advance their own political cause, irrespective of the actual consequences for children who end up in absolute need.
You could not find a society that is more corrupt than that. You could not find political leadership that has lost its way so badly.
You could not find anyone who claims to be motivated by Christian faith, who is so far removed from the mantra that was provided by Jesus of Nazareth, which was, 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' Trump, Vance, and all those in the administration clearly have no idea what that means. They've never read it, and they don't care about it, and they're indifferent to the teachings to which they claim loyalty, which they only promote to advance their own cause.
This is corruption writ large. I find the scenes at Mar-a-Lago in themselves offensive because of the waste that they embody at a time when we know that we can't afford that waste because it is fuelling the climate crisis. But I find it so much more sinister and disturbing because we know that, simultaneously, people are being made to suffer deliberately for the Republican political cause.
When that happens, a democracy is tottering on the brink. And the American democracy is tottering on the brink. It's tottering on the brink of failure because Trump has brought it to that place. And he has brought it to that place deliberately because he believes this is the route to perpetual power for him and his family in a way that will advance his cause, and that of a few selected others, at cost to everyone else about whom he simply doesn't care.
Democracy can't survive indifference.
Democracy is built on care.
Democracy is built on respect.
Democracy has to treat everyone as if they are equal.
And in a society where that is not the case, and Trump so obviously represents such a society, then democracy is in peril.
We face the risk that in Europe there are many who would like to copy Trump and replicate his programmes here for the advantage of a few at cost to the many. We can't afford that. We can't afford that in human terms. We can't afford that in climate terms. We can't afford that in terms of democracy. We can't afford that in terms of the alternative, which is exploitation and ultimately fascism, and all that leads to.
We have to reclaim the politics of care from these people who are only interested in the politics of power. It's time to say enough. It's time to expose these people for what they are. The utter charlatans, the fraudsters, the falsehoods that they put forward, and the deceit behind their claims to be delivering for everyone.
We have to talk about how to do that delivery for everyone in reality. That means we must reject the people like Trump, like Farage and others throughout Europe who will try to do the same thing.
This is the moment where we have to decide whether to pivot, and pivot away from the wealthy and their corruption and towards the poorest and their dignity, because actually that's what the poorest have. They have dignity. They are survivors; when these people are exploiters, and they're fundamentally different in tone, as a consequence.
The survivors know what it means to face difficulty and come through it. The exploiters know nothing about that; they just know how to abuse. I vote for those with dignity, those who want to survive and those who must survive. We have to have that politics of care, and we can no longer afford people like Trump.
Comments
When commenting, please take note of this blog's comment policy, which is available here. Contravening this policy will result in comments being deleted before or after initial publication at the editor's sole discretion and without explanation being required or offered.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
The bottom 10% in the USA are starving and they are greater in number than the population of Gaza 30 times over.
I’m presuming a Gaza population of around a million after the genocide and mass starvation in that calculation.
How could the USA do even worse than this to its own peoples, and moreover manipulate the media to persuade more people to come.
Starvation is a a political weapon
“As societies become less egaletarian, people feel more pressure to pursue ever higher incomes and more glamorous status. this consigns ever more people to the treadmill of perpetual consumerism.” [From Jason Hickel]
“Only when the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten and the last stream poisoned, will you realise that you cannot eat money.” [From a Cree Indian proverb]
Much to agree with
It’s not quite an ill wind. He is making obvious the disdain he feels for the ordinary people and their problems. It is goodie ( to an extent ) and Baddie situation. It is helpful for the fight back.
Sometimes I think the majority of us live on another planet from the rich and most of the polity. Some in social science believe that the Dark Triad of pathology (those lacking empathy and morality in general) is a quadrat including Greed. I do not extend charity or forgiveness to them, only retribution, I’m afraid. I’ve seen too much of them in my 7+ decades.
The Great Gatsby is indeed an evisceration of the ignorant wealthy – the ‘careless people’ – and it’s no accident that Sarah Wynn-Williams recently chose this phrase of Fitzgerald’s for the title of her exposé of Facebook’s ‘greed and lost idealism’. For Gatsby is indeed a comprehensive deconstruction of the American Dream itself. 40 years before Dubord wrote The Society of the Spectacle (and in French ‘spectacle’ also alludes to show-business), Fitzgerald’s central image – it was on the cover of the first edition – is the eyes of T.J.Eckleburg, the god-like giant advertising hoarding that broods over the devastated industrial wasteland of ‘the valley of ashes’; in Gatsby’s library the owl-eyed man admires the authentic old books – and the fact that Gatsby ‘knew when to stop’ – ‘didn’t cut the pages’ – because of course the show must not be broken by any real knowledge of the corrupt reality.
And if the opinion polls prove to be accurate, in a little over three years time the odious Farage, and his gang of equally repulsive cohorts, will be in power at Westminster, so be prepared for similar policies to enacted here.
That’s a long time in politics. There are so many variables, one being the millions pumped into racist perversions via social media, another the servility of Labour to USA including corporations, and the sale of UK infrastructure. Will they gain more traction? Will Reform evolve into Johnsonian Tory with Farage defenestrated? Will there be a continued growth of the the Greens with commensurate power? So many variables, but one thing I’m sure of, while the media continue to promenade someone on the far right to the exclusion of others, that person may gain the votes of the 30% required for power. It might not be Farage.
Similar policies are being enacted here. Look at the cuts to foreign aid. Look at the vicious attacks on immigrants. Look at the increasingly militaristic postures of our government and its trumpeted commitment to spending more on “defence”.
I’d forgotten the phrase “love thy neighbour as thyself” but it’s now been borne out by modern research into the nature of life, namely that such an approach of caring generates cooperation and this works really well as a “survival of the fittest” evolutionary mechanism. Here are just a couple of writings on this theme. There are many more from all types of experts:-
http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/42836/1/380.pdf#page=546
https://api.mountainscholar.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/c08c4ee8-632e-4735-8239-4ac0c73d270b/content
Suprisingly there’s also an argument that the human invention of money boosted democracy a vehicle where we can if we choose express our “self” and “other” caring by avoiding voting for political parties that use the necessary taxation element of money to extort money for an elite, the so-called “socialism for the rich.”
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5141&context=lcp
See page 89:-
“… a stream of scholars from James Steuart to Charles Tilly have identified negotiation over monetized taxes as the birthplace of democracy, arguing that citizens holding wealth in money gain political leverage for many reasons, including that they can move money, come to protect it as personal property and, we might add, use it to finance resistance.”
Thanks
There’s a bible story from the days of the Jewish Babylonian exile, that Trump and his fellow tyrants should read – it’s called “Belshazzar’s Feast”, and the punch line is, “Mene, mene, tekel parsin”. (Weighed in the balance and found wanting)
It can be found in the very confusing book of Daniel, Chapter 5, part prophecy, part history, part heavily encrypted apocalyptic, but its basic meaning in this section is pretty clear.
Trump’s bloated court has definitely got to the same luxury indulgent contemptuous stage.
See Daniel Chapter 5
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel%205&version=CEV
and if you want to read the prequel about Belshazzar’s dad, Nebuchadnezzar, who came a cropper during his “huge golden statue of myself” stage, then that can be found here
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel%204&version=CEV
in Chapter 4
and the golden statue that led Nebuchadnezzar to this arrogance is erected (to be worshipped) in Chapter 3
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel%203&version=CEV
These old stories are bang up to date, tyrants haven’t changed much over the centuries.
The late Saparmurat Niyazov, President of Turkmenistan, had a golden statue of himself erected a few years ago, and King Donald’s Mar-a-Lago Halloween feast is pure Belshazzar.
No wonder King Donald has nightmares about Iran!
I wonder if there is a Daniel somewhere in the White House with the courage and integrity, to say “NO!” to Trump?
Thanks