Breadlines and Ballrooms

A Jazz-Age masquerade for the ruling class, a can of lentils for everyone else, and a president who still “doesn’t give a shit.”

Good morning! The champagne still hasn’t stopped fizzing at Mar-a-Lago, though the rest of the country can’t afford bubbles in their tap water. On Halloween night, as D.C. police and National Guardsmen tried to corral chaos at the Navy Yard, Donald Trump and his entourage were busy reenacting The Great Gatsby in a ballroom lit like Versailles on fentanyl. The party’s official theme, A Little Party Never Killed Nobody, might have sounded cute to the guests in their sequined flapper dresses, but it hit differently for the 42 million Americans who spent the same night rationing lentils and ramen noodles. Nothing says “let them eat cake” like a president hosting a Jazz-Age pastiche while a government shutdown starves its citizens.

Outside the gilded gates, the real America was running on fumes. In Mississippi, single mother Danielle Sulton loaded Amazon packages to close an $833 gap left by suspended food-stamp payments. In West Virginia, Lolita Arnold’s entire pantry consisted of a can of beef, a box of Corn Flakes, and a bag of lentils, her breakfast, a banana; her dinner, instant potatoes with canned gravy. Trump’s Agriculture Department announced it would simply stop paying for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program on November 1 because, well, Congress hadn’t passed a funding bill and the optics of mass hunger were apparently less urgent than a new chandelier for the Lincoln Bathroom.

A Rhode Island judge temporarily saved the program, ordering the administration to cough up contingency funding. But Trump’s lawyers immediately rushed to “clarify” the ruling, legalese for stall and blame the Democrats later. Food banks from North Carolina to Indiana are collapsing under record demand, Salvation Army workers say they’re feeding twice as many families as last month, and Trump’s White House is busy polishing the marble in the Lincoln bathroom. A government of gold faucets and empty stomachs.

When the president finally wandered before reporters, he sounded like a man possessed by a dial-up modem. “The shutdown proceeds because the gener … the de … the Democrats just don’t know what they’re doing,” he slurred, before promising to “do some testing” of nuclear weapons, as though mushroom clouds might distract from empty pantries. Inflation’s up, jobs are down, SNAP is gasping for air, and Trump’s grand solution is to redecorate and detonate. The man speaks in sentence fragments because his presidency is one.

At least the courts are still faintly breathing. In D.C., Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly permanently blocked Trump’s March 25 executive order requiring voters to present passports or similar documents before casting a ballot, a poll tax with better branding. She reminded the administration that the Constitution gives states, not the president, control over elections. The ACLU called it a victory for democracy. Trump called it “unfair.”

While one judge was defending democracy, another was asking a darker question: why had a Department of Justice filing accusing Trump of posting Barack Obama’s home address vanished from the federal docket? The document linked Trump’s online doxxing to January 6 rioter Taylor Taranto, who later live-streamed himself outside Obama’s home making threats. The filing described the attack as a “violent riot,” which apparently crossed some new red line in Trump’s regime. Within days, two Assistant U.S. Attorneys, Carlos Valdevilla and Samuel White, were placed on leave, and the memo simply disappeared. No motion to seal, no court order, just gone.

Judge Timothy Nichols, a Trump appointee but a functioning adult, demanded to know who made it disappear. “It’s not entirely clear to me how that brief was sealed,” he said, judicial code for what the hell did you people do? Insiders whisper that senior officials in Trump’s DOJ quietly called the clerk’s office and ordered the record scrubbed. Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman called it “Orwellian,” warning that every career prosecutor now lives in terror of typing the words “January 6.” The rule of law has been replaced with the rule of autocorrect: delete “insurrection,” substitute “patriotic sightseeing tour.”

Trump is so detached from the real world that even if he had an ounce of empathy, he could never put the needs of the American people above his own reflex for self-preservation. Every crisis becomes a mirror for his ego, hunger relief, voting rights, national security, even bathroom décor. He governs like a man frantically wallpapering over history with his own reflection, terrified that truth might break through the gold leaf. Outside his palace of mirrors, America waits: hungry, anxious, unseen.

And yet, beyond our borders, a faint counter-melody plays. In the Netherlands, voters just rejected their own brand of populist demagoguery. Centrist and progressive parties surged, and Geert Wilders, Europe’s peroxide prophet of grievance, stumbled. Dutch analysts call it a “pivot back to the centre,” a small democratic correction after years of far-right theatrics. Housing, healthcare, and dignity won more votes than hatred did. While Trump’s America pirouettes deeper into its Great Depression masquerade, the Dutch have quietly demonstrated that democracy, when fed properly, still grows back.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “they were careless people, Tom and Daisy, they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.” Nearly a century later, the careless people are back, only this time they’re livestreaming it on Truth Social. The breadlines stretch, the ballrooms gleam, and the Great Gatsby of Palm Beach keeps dancing as the republic sinks beneath the music.

Mr. President, a little party can kill somebody. It’s killing a nation, one golden faucet at a time. Miles Taylor once said of Donald Trump that he “doesn’t give a shit,” and there’s no better epitaph for this era. The man will watch the country starve, torch the courts, and bury the truth rather than face accountability. The government isn’t shut down because of gridlock, it’s shut down because Trump is terrified of the Epstein files and will hold the nation hostage to keep them sealed.

So the pressure can’t come from inside the party; the rot’s too deep. It has to come from the people themselves, the constituents who are tired of eating canned gravy while their representatives cower behind a Mar-a-Lago dance floor. They need to melt the phone lines, flood their representatives field offices, and remind every Republican in Congress that their job description still includes governing. Trump may be impervious to human need, but the House isn’t, not if the voters stop letting them hide behind his shadow.

In the end, a president who “doesn’t give a shit” only survives when no one else does either.