This year is the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” On Oct. 31, 2025, President Trump hosted a Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago. This celebration at the $1,000,000 membership initiation fee club, attended by the outrageously wealthy donors to the president, a few months after the world’s richest man was allowed to take a wrecking ball to the government’s staffing and funding, at the cusp of the longest-ever government shutdown, and occurring on the eve of stoppage of SNAP payments, was almost designed to illustrate the theme of Fitzgerald’s novel. 

As the novel’s narrator, Nick, observed about the ultra-wealthy couple Tom and Daisy Buchanan, he could have been talking about the host at Mar-a-Lago: 

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

The elections on Nov. 4, 2025, have brought us the first of the clean-up crew.

Cletis Boyer
Belfast