Let Them Eat Marble and Big Beautiful Ballroom

Hours after exultantly posting 24 photos about his gaudy new marble bathroom and hours before he defiantly refused to fund food stamps and health care subsidies for 42 million Americans, King Donald held a glitzy Great-Gatsby-themed party for his robber baron cronies and their plastic molls, thus adding to his myriad crimes by defiling a luminous, pivotal book that assails the moral depredations of the rich. Tell us without telling us you don't know how it and its toxic Gilded Age ends.

So much winning. As government employees work unpaid, soaring health care costs loom, DOGE cuts slow air traffic and social services, the U.S. debt rockets to a record 38-plus trillion dollars, and health experts say the country wastes nearly $400 billion in food each year, MAGA Republicans are playing a vile real-live version of The Hunger Games, threatening to make over 40 million Americans, about half of them kids, go hungry in order to...umm... wait....stick it to the Marxist libs? Perversely, unwittingly highlight the damage wrought by their fucking Big Beautiful Bill that mindlessly cut $187 billion from food stamps in the august name of making fat cats fatter? Drive home the righteous insistence of these princes among men that if we don't let them take doctors away from sick people they're gonna take food away from poor people?

Thus do we witness the threat of "the greatest hunger catastrophe in America since the Great Depression," despite earlier promises, existing laws, historic precedents, two judges' rulings in Boston and Rhode Island of "irreparable harm" without action to 1 in 5 households, 90% of which are poorer, older people with disabilities, fixed incomes, lousy jobs, a deployed spouse who need the paltry $187 a month to get by in Trump-inflated times- and despite an available contingency fund of up to $23 billion outlined in a now-mysteriously-deleted, 55-page plan posted in September on the USDA website, all of which call and clamor for SNAP’s operations to continue. The website does, though, now boast the twisted howler that Dems are keeping government closed “to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures." Sigh.

Slimy lying reptile MAGA Mike has offered abundant reasons why they have to leave kids hungry right now - sorry, not sorry - like they can't legally move funds or they're for natural disasters or there has to be "a pre-existing appropriation" for the funds or oops now they "no longer exist" - see big beautiful bill - or "the pain register" isn't high enough yet or when Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told America "your government is failing you" she def meant Democrats. Also, he's had to keep the House in recess for over 40 days because they're "doing some of the most meaningful work of their careers" and "I don't want to pull them away from that work." They still haven't created a single spending bill, with stopgap funding about to expire, but listen it's really not his lane and he's been "very busy," really, "very busy," and besides he doesn't know anything.

Meanwhile, his vile cohorts are likewise "very busy" telling racist, vicious, scapegoating, fear-mongering lies about who may be about to go hungry in the richest country in the world and why. Essentially, 'cause fuck 'em. They argue that if 42 million people are struggling to survive in an oligarchic hellscape of inequity and abominable policy, they must all be cheats, frauds, losers or lazy gangsters of color who make bad life choices. White supremacist Mike Davis: "We should only help people who can't help themselves. Get off your fat, ghetto asses. Get a job. Stop reproducing. Change your shitty culture." Also, despite undocumented immigrants being ineligible and many immigrants with papers needing help 'cause they work (hard) at shitty low-paying jobs, "Stop giving food stamps to immigrants. We don’t want you here, if you won’t work."

A GOP strategist claimed food isn't going to 16 million hungry "children" but "socialist beasts." Clay Higgins figured moochers getting about $4200 a year - $6.20 a person a day - should have a month of groceries stocked ahead and thus "should never again receive SNAP, because wow, stop smoking crack." Another cretin charged, "People are selling their benefits. People are using them to get their nails done, to get their weaves and their hair." What would Jesus do? A mathematical genius at Newsmax broke down the ethnicity of SNAP recipients to declare most of those "getting food stamps from the US Government and US Taxpayer are not even Americans." Breaking news: The majority of recipients are white, like the lawmakers yelling at people to make better choices who can't even manage to keep the government open.

In contrast, Democrats, mostly normal human beings, have been trying to help, not berate or demean. Many are rallying support for food banks; over 200 reps urged the USDA to use the damn funds; 25 blue state governors and A.G.s filed an emergency lawsuit that led to one of the court rulings; Hakeem Jeffries said of a GOP that stripped $187 billion from SNAP, "People oughtta believe Republicans care about hunger? Get lost with that"; Amy Klobuchar voiced a bottom line obvious to everyone but MAGA and Israel: "Hunger isn’t a bargaining chip.” And Colorado Rep. Joe Neguse gave a master class to the media in how to stop gaslighting and blaming Dems for problems created by a MIA regime: "We’re here in Washington. You’re here in Washington. House Republicans are gone...The Administration needs to follow the law."

Also speaking up are ordinary, eloquent Americans who live in the world, have maybe been broke, and are tired of the self-serving bullshit from those in power seeking to hide their lies and greed and mindless cruelty. One online advocate had a newsflash for "Y'all out here cheering that SNAP’s delayed like it’s some kind of win that Makes America Great Again." On those who may suffer: "Not strangers. Not scammers. Real people. People you know, work with, respect and even love. That’s who you’re trying to starve." "Those EBT cards you love to hate are what keep your local economy alive," she wrote, with every $1 in SNAP spending sparking $1.50–$1.80 in local economic activity. "The economy doesn’t crumble from the top down; it collapses from the bottom up," she said. "They're not draining the swamp. They're drowning you."

And in their free time, which is most of the time, they're golfing. This weekend, precisely when benefits were set to run out for millions of Americans reportedly feeling "terror" about how to feed their kids, the clueless narcissist who put it all in motion and whose Nazi daddy gave him millions starting out so he'd never, ever have to think about such unsavory things, embarked on his 13th, $3.4 million golf trip to Mar-A-Lago - his 76th golf outing so far at a total cost to taxpayers of $60.7 million. En route, on his private, planet-destroying Air Force One, he went online to boast about his "absolutely gorgeous" renovation of the White House's Lincoln Bathroom, which is now slathered in "highly polished, statuary marble" at a time when, "Sure, you might not be able to eat or go to the doctor, but check out how nice Trump's new marble Lincoln shitter is."

He was so excited about it he posted no less than 24 photos of its blinding, gleaming splendor: marble everywhere like someone puked it out, gold hooks, faucets, trash can, even soap dish with a presidential seal, all carefully chosen by the guy with the "famously bad interior design taste." He bragged he'd replaced the art-deco green tiling, "totally inappropriate for the Lincoln era," speculating its garish glaring re-do "in fact could be the marble that was originally there!”; a skeptical expert suggested it more likely came from a bankrupt Trump casino. His giddy celebration of a glitzy marble bathroom at that particular fraught moment for so many of his alleged constituents, it was observed, was so wildly tone-deaf it could "make the history books" as a tawdry symbol of his administration. And it could have, if things didn't quickly get worse.

He boasted about another kingly remodel - yet more Saddam-style white marble - of the Kennedy Center, where ticket sales have plummeted and left most shows facing half-empty seats. "It is really looking good!" he exclaimed of a stately landmark he said was "dead as a doornail. We are bringing (it) back to life!" Asked about the shutdown on its 31st day - he's refused to meet with Democrats and ordered lackeys to do the same - he retorted, "It's their fault. Everything is their fault." He also claimed SNAP recipients are mostly Dems, as in, why bother. Anyway, he was very busy too - in this case, getting ready for his lavish, black-tie, tone-deaf, Great-Gatsby-themed Halloween party dubbed, "A little party never killed nobody,” theme song for a 2013 movie of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic1925 novel - yes, there's a book! - about the careless vapid rich.

Dancers dressed as flappers at The Great Gatsby partyPhoto by press pool

In his dark, gorgeous, mournful novel, Fitzgerald skewered the hollow, amoral lives of the Jazz Age's hedonistic rich - their loveless marriages, flamboyant parties and deadly heedless laying waste to the lives around them. Skipping most of the downer parts, the Mar-A-Lago version went for the garish, razzle-dazzle visuals - flighty flappers in feathers and glitter, giant champagne glasses for showgirls to curl in, silver and gold baubles, a lush dessert spread, an army of servers, poolside networking, live music by several bands, many sexy dancers in scanty outfits and feather fans. Amidst the smoky, raucous scene - old rich white men in vests and hats, younger plumped and tightened floozies by their side - sat Trump, grimly smirking, his Oompa-Loompa make-up line visible but who among his gaudy, grimacing subjects would acknowledge it?

Video showed Trump, no costume but stuffed into black tie, lurching about in his ridiculous robot fist dance to YMCA - clearly a Prohibition-era favorite - alongside a very high Elon Musk and very stiff Melania evidently singing an entirely different song, and who could blame her. Online, his supporters, with tags like "The Bespoke Life," were jubilant. The Oompa-Lumpa King was "the walking image of success," not a crude, incoherent sociopath. "He just brought home trillions from Asia," imagined one fan. Another marveled, "He's 79 years old, just back from a long Asia trip, now partying it up. Trump is a machine." Missing parts, but okay. Here, America's real-life hunger games could not be any further away: His, "Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make” moment," precisely as food stamps were cancelled, was "the most Nero thing ever."

The optics, the timing, the splashy freak show at that harsh moment in time for so many left online viewers stunned, pissed, helpless with horror. They summoned an old Vincent Price movie, Mask of the Red Death, "that did not end well for the party-goers." They quoted the Beatles: "Everywhere there’s lots of piggies living piggy lives/ You can see them out for dinner with their piggy wives/ Clutching forks and knives/ To eat their bacon." They urged all those working in health care to, "Remember their faces and let them wipe their arses themselves." They raved about ghouls, botox, Pedo-Lago, an American Horror Story, Trump's costume "as a human being," Marie Antoinette: "Let them eat statuary marble." Of several sleek dancing women of color who tomorrow could be picked up by ICE, they railed, "What in the fucking exploitation bullshit is this."

Scarily, gruesomely, it was the Hunger Games brought to ruthless life: "May the odds be ever in your favor." It was the Gilded Age, always a metaphor for a thin layer of gold cunningly laid over cheap metal, often lead, a facade of wealth hiding something harsh and toxic. And it was The Great Gatsby, the sorrowful real one Fitzgerald dreamed with its boredom, its lies, the sheen of glamor and languid excess "wherever people were rich together." "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy," Nick famously muses. "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 final irony: The illiterate MAGA mob understood nothing, above all how both the hero and his era end - dead in the water.