President Trump’s Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, set to the theme of “The Great Gatsby,” re-enacted the decadence of that story’s licentious era: befeathered flappers shimmying in the crowd; gilded and onyx décor; scantily clad women posing in an enormous champagne coupe. The revelatory moment says so much about where we stand today — and what we could be lurching into next.
Published a century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” captured the culture of an overheated economy on the brink of demise. Just as Jay Gatsby fell from the height of fortune to an ignominious death, the 1920s roared with financial overindulgence until the markets drowned in the Wall Street crash of 1929. The Great Depression followed, and the consequences for the global economy proved calamitous.
