Halloween Great Gatsby: The Felon's Growing Obliviousness to Reality

The latest polls show the Felon has a 36% approval rate (a new low even for him), yet the Felon claims he's more popular than ever.  Meanwhile, despite the Felon's claims that inflation is down as are consumer prices, the reality is that both are still high and more and more consumers belatedly are realizing that the Felon's campaign promises were all lies - something many of us recognized long before the actual election - even as the Felon's constant golf trips are costing taxpayers tens millions of dollars.  Indeed, the Felon appears increasingly detached from objective reality and seeming views himself as a monarch and has said that all of his orders to the military - including the murder of occupants of small boats in the Caribbean and and Pacific - "are legal" because he pronounced them.  However, perhaps nothing symbolizes the Felon's obliviousness to reality more than his Halloween "Great Gatsby" party at Mar-a-Lago surrounded by grifters, CEO's who are basically paying bribes as they "pay to play", and sycophants from his regime at the same time millions of Americans were seeing SNAP benefits halted and millions more were bracing for huge increases in medical insurance costs thanks to the grotesque "big beautiful bill" that gave huge tax cuts to the wealthy while screwing over everyone else and shredding the social safety net.  A piece at The New Republic looks at both the obscene party and the Felon's fantasy world he is inhabiting.  Here are excerpts:

Scantily clad young women dancing in tall revolving martini glasses greeted the guests as they entered Mar-a-Lago. Models dressed as flappers with huge white feathers pretended spontaneous gaiety. On Halloween, nine months, 40 weeks, and three days into Donald Trump’s second administration, he celebrated the apex of his image as an almighty ruler by staging a dress-up Great Gatsby party for select club members, Cabinet officials, friends, and family, in a conspicuous display of his omnipotence and invulnerability.

Trump serenely presided as the godhead at his party in homage to the roaring twenties of the twentieth century, as though he had revived its heyday. He certainly had not read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel and comprehended its tragic plot or understood how those ’20s ended in the Great Crash. Historians of the future will mark October 31, 2025, the date of the Great Gatsby party, where Trump basked in glowing adulation, as his peak moment of obliviousness before the deluge.

The federal government was in the thirtieth day of a shutdown that would last until November 13. Trump and the Republicans refused to extend subsidies for premiums under the Affordable Care Act, which would lead to astronomical increases, at least doubling for 22 million people, with millions struggling to pay and 4.2 million losing coverage entirely, according to the Congressional Budget Office. More than a million federal workers were missing their paychecks. With air traffic controllers working without pay, flights to 40 major airports were reduced by 10 percent. Perhaps most alarmingly, especially against the backdrop of a party celebrating 1920s excess, food benefits for 42 million people, including 16 million children, under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, would be cut on November 1.

Trump sat poolside like a sultan at Mar-a-Lago, idolized by his guests, exuding complacency. Seated at his table with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. attorney from the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News talk-show host, wearing a gold headdress, Trump grinned approvingly at a guest dressed in an orange jumpsuit with the words “STATE PRISON” stenciled on the back, perhaps costumed as a migrant about to be deported.

Trump believed there could be no consequences for whatever he wished to do—whether it was to send the military into American cities, impose tariffs on any country without regard to the Congress, grant pardons to political allies and those with the resources to buy into his family’s crypto business, indict his designated enemies, slash food stamps, increase health insurance premiums, enrich himself to the tune of an estimated $3.4 billion, according to a New Yorker investigation—or order his Department of Justice to suppress the Epstein files.

The more Trump is praised, the greater he believes is his popularity. He trusts in his accolades as a science of alchemy. “I have the best Polling Numbers that I have ever received,” Trump tweeted on October 27. “I have the best numbers for any president in many years—any president.”

Four days after the Gatsby party, under a cloud of economic pessimism, chiefly darkened by the betrayal of his pledge to lower inflation on day one, the Democrats swept elections, on November 4, in a wholesale repudiation of Trump and his policies. Trump was more unpopular than he had ever been . . . . Before Trump had departed Washington for his Gatsby party, he had left behind a White House transformed into a kitsch Byzantine palace, its makeover a symbol of his uninhibited power and his self-proclaimed “Golden Age.” He treated the White House as another of his properties that he redesigned as he wished, his Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac.

With Trump, style follows dysfunction. Gold trim appliqués have been pasted everywhere, the Rose Garden paved over, renamed the Rose Garden Club with colored umbrellas covering tables for lobbyists and wealthy supplicants, an exact replication of Mar-a-Lago, and the East Wing torn down for his monstrous ballroom, to be paid for by corporations seeking his favor for government contracts and to avoid retribution. The symmetrical Federalist design of the White House’s two wings, originally intended to stand as a monument against monarchical pomposity and to reflect the balance of power required to sustain a republic, was being daily defiled.

If there is a Gatsby in Trump’s story, it is the self-invented swindler and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, though Gatsby seems like an innocent compared to Epstein. Epstein is now six years dead, but he used to be at the Mar-a-Lago festivities frequently. “I was Donald’s closest friend for ten years,” Epstein said. He and Donald lived just about a mile apart in Palm Beach, cavorting together in a blur of debauched scenes.

While lines began forming at food pantries around the country, Trump’s Great Gatsby party was a cavalcade of the mummified hangers-on of 2025, not the bright young things of 1925. The thrill of the hunt, with Epstein chasing a lineup of models, was replaced with the procession of the nouveau MAGA royalty kissing the king’s ring. Washington plastic surgeons, who have worked on Trump-orbit clients, have dubbed their look “that Mar-a-Lago face.” One D.C. doctor told Axios that constant Botox and cosmetic alterations create a syndrome of “filler blindness,” where in a world of similarly over-treated changelings, “you lose sight of anatomic normalcy.” 

Trump’s guests sat in tables around the pool. Instead of Jay Gatsby’s lifeless body, two large metallic balls bobbed in the water. Trump could not have imagined that they were abstract representations of himself and Epstein, the remembrance of things past.

For months now, more than 1,000 FBI agents have been working at the FBI’s Central Records Complex, instructed by Director Kash Patel to flag and redact Trump’s name from the voluminous Epstein files. “Trump” is being “blacked out,” according to Bloomberg News. The FBI refused to comment.

Flying back from Palm Beach to Washington on November 14, aboard Air Force One, Catherine Lucey, a Bloomberg reporter, asked Trump, “If there’s nothing incriminating in the files, sir, why not …” Trump pointed his finger at her and said angrily, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.” The party was over.

The man and his hangers on are despicable.