A Little Party Never Killed Nobody — But Starvation Sure as Fuck Has
Trump’s Halloween gala at Mar-a-Lago was The Great Gatsby rewritten by a moron.
“They were careless people… 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.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
We all know damn well Donald Trump has never read The Great Gatsby. The man hasn’t read the entirety of a fucking Denny’s menu. He doesn’t have the attention span to make it through the instructions on a bottle of Tylenol, even now that he knows what the hell Tylenol actually is.
Trump does not read. He consumes. He absorbs attention the way a roach absorbs Raid—staggering, twitching, and somehow still kicking. He has never understood that Gatsby was a tragedy, not a tutorial. All he knows is that the people were rich, and that is all he needs. He treats Fitzgerald’s cautionary tale like a real-estate brochure, skimming for square footage and never once noticing the bodies buried underneath. So, he took the autopsy of the American dream and decided to host the wake.
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They called it The Great Gatsby Gala, because of fucking course they did. It was held on Halloween—because when monsters throw a ball, they don’t bother with masks—and it was less a party than a ritual sacrifice of empathy. Versailles by way of a pawn shop, every surface polished just enough to reflect the emptiness. Forty-two million Americans were about to lose their food assistance. Sixteen million of them were children. And inside Mar-a-Lago, beneath cheap imported constellations and counterfeit chandeliers, they toasted themselves with champagne that cost more than a month of groceries.
The whole damn thing looked like The Hunger Games and a Jersey Shore reunion had a baby and left it to starve in a gold-plated crib. It was excess without irony, spectacle without soul, a carnival of moral decay so on the nose it could have been satire if it weren’t our reality.
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And yes, everyone has written about it—the grotesque irony, the cruelty, the perfect on-the-nose obscenity of it all. But that is precisely why we must keep talking. Because that is their strategy. They are counting on fatigue. They want our outrage to fade, our attention to drift. They want us to shrug, to normalize their gluttony, to accept their callousness as the cost of living in their world. They want to rub our faces in their excess until we stop flinching.
So no, we do not move on. We drag it into the light every time. We name it, ridicule it, record it, flood the timeline with it until even their gold-plated lies begin to corrode. Because silence is the only currency they can still afford to buy, and I am not fucking selling.
Mar-a-Lago is not a palace. It is a theme park for the insecure, a monument to bad taste dipped in butter and guilt. The walls gleam like old jewelry pawned too many times, the air heavy and perfumed, thick with decay disguised as divinity, like someone tried to Lysol the devil and called it clean. The carpets whisper underfoot, sticky with champagne and secrets. Even the wallpaper feels exhausted, sagging under the weight of borrowed luxury.
The lighting burns too bright for comfort and too dim for truth, bleaching everything in the desperate glow of a reality-TV confession. It doesn’t flatter; it exposes. The chandeliers droop like overworked drag queens, dripping counterfeit glamour onto tables that smell faintly of money and meat. Even the mirrors have surrendered, smearing faces into waxy caricatures, reflections warped by ego and heat. The whole room hums with sickness, like vanity turned airborne.
The crowd glistened under the lights, not with glamour but with the greasy sheen of desperation. The women tottered across the marble like Cinderella’s stepsisters who’d mugged the fairy godmother and spent the wish money on Botox. Their gowns clung like plastic wrap over panic, sequins stitched over despair. Their faces were shrines to bad judgment—lips swollen like bruises, brows pulled so tight they looked permanently startled by their own reflections, cheekbones carved by surgeons with a vendetta against subtlety. Their breasts jutted forward like trophies from a war on aging, high, hard, and gleaming under the lights, proof that gravity has better taste than God. Each one a carbon copy of the last, an assembly line of silicone and self-loathing pretending to be desirable, blinking through a fog of denial and designer perfume.
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They looked almost human if you squinted, like mannequins that had just discovered shame. They circled one another like vultures in couture, measuring diamonds, surgeons, and how many mistresses their husbands were currently babysitting. Their laughter splintered through the air, brittle and shrill, the hollow sound of champagne colliding with vanity. The men beside them puffed and preened, mistaking volume for charm, mistaking the scent of money for proof of worth.
The buffet groaned under the weight of food destined to die unbitten. Towers of shrimp sweated beneath heat lamps. Slabs of beef bled luxury onto linen. Sauces gleamed like oil slicks on silver platters. Perfectly good food scraped off plates by staff paid to pretend not to notice, tossed into bins while children went to bed hungry.
That’s what really pisses me off. When I couldn’t afford to feed my kids, I used to picture other families clearing their tables, scraping plates, tossing food without thinking. That casual disregard. That blind abundance. I would imagine it and ache, hearing the scrape of silverware, the hum of a dishwasher, the quiet safety of people who never had to count what was left in the fridge before payday.
Back then, I was a single mom working full-time as a paraprofessional, helping autistic preschoolers learn how to communicate, how to trust, how to be seen. I made sixteen dollars and change an hour before taxes. It was enough to exhaust me but not enough to live on. My friends used to sneak groceries into my car so my kids wouldn’t know. You never forget that kind of kindness. You never forget the sting of gratitude that feels too big for your chest or the shame that should never have been yours to carry.
The same devourers feasting at Mar-a-Lago dare to call the hungry lazy. But SNAP recipients are not lazy. They are the working poor, the retired, the recovering, people clawing through a system designed to keep them starving while the rich dine on sympathy and steak.
There is no shame in needing help. The shame belongs to those who hoard what could heal us, to the billionaires throwing Gatsby parties while families pray their EBT cards still work. Hunger is not a moral failure. It is a national disgrace. It is a choice made in boardrooms and banquet halls where the chandeliers cost more than a year’s rent.
Because I’ve lived that fear, the one they pretend doesn’t exist. That kind of fear doesn’t fade. It settles inside you like dust, quiet and invisible but impossible to shake. Even now, I can’t scrape a plate without remembering what it once meant to me, what it still means to tens of millions of Americans tonight.
There is plenty of money in America. There is money for new jets, new ballrooms, bailouts of foreign banks. There is money for fifty-thousand-dollar signing bonuses for ICE agents, for oil executives, for Kristi Noem’s private flights and Kash Patel’s vanity trips. There is money for everything but mercy. For everything but meals.
This is not wealth. It is rot polished to a shine, the same sickness Fitzgerald saw a century ago, the moral gangrene beneath the glitter. The dream corrupted by ego and excess. Trump is the infection made flesh, a man trying to buy eternity one chandelier at a time.
He is Gatsby rewritten by a moron. No poetry. No longing. Only gluttony. Only greed.
They call this winning. I call it what it is: corruption in couture, cruelty with a crown.
A Great Gatsby costume party thrown in a collapsing empire.
A little party never killed nobody, they say, but starvation sure as fuck has.
