The Great Gatsby Era and the Decivillizing Process of the Second Trump Administration

The Great Gatsby Era 

and the 

Decivilizing Process of the Second Trump Administration

The purpose of this essay is to draw a comparison between the parallels and the differences found between the 1920s and the second Trump administration. 

I

The Great Gatsby and Trump

On October 3, 2025, the President threw a Great Gatsby themed party.  An estimated 300 to 500 costumed guests descended on Mar-a-Lago to identify with the great wealth of Jay Gatsby, and the affluence of the 1920s. Trump family members, Administration officials, friends, and rich doners rubbed elbows with each other and confirmed their rightful place among the privileged. Befitting the indifference of Jay Gatsby, the party was cast during the 31-day government shutdown and hours before an estimated 42 million people lost their access to SNAP (food stamp) benefits. Well, so! “A little party never killed anyone.”

Who then is this great Gatsby with whom the wealthy and powerful sought to identify?  We can ask the question, but we know that it was not a novel character that attracted the guests. Their Gatsby is Donald Trump and the money and power he represents. Trump himself? Does he identify with Gatsby? Of course not. Trump does not identify with anyone.  He is singular. He is alone. He exists only in his own mind. When a Times reporter asked if there were any limits on his power, Trump replied, “My own morality, my own mind.” 

His own mind? What does that even mean? Let me hazard a guess: the world only exists as a reflection of his thoughts, his instincts, his desires. Perhaps that is why evidence seems to indicate that any contradiction, i.e., (He lost the 2020 election,  Greenland doesn’t want to be owned by the US, Renee Nichole Good, shot, and shot, and shot again, at point blank range was not a terrorist), is experienced by Trump as an affront or even a threat to himself because it challenges the insular world he lives in.   

The Great Gatsby, celebrated by Trump on October 3, was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published in 1925. It is often cited as a critique of the spiritual malaise and “live for today,” attitude of the twenties. The problem is that the novel is too limited to represent the ethos of a decade. It offers sociological depth with the characterization of only one economic class, and only four main characters in that class. While the lower-income Wilsons do represent a different economic group, they are only two characters and are not finely drawn enough to be representative of an economic group. In addition, any sociological critique in the novel is overwhelmed by the psychological nature of the narrative. Focusing on the inner lives, trauma, and distorted motivations of the characters as well as the deep traumatic neurosis of Gatsby, a neurosis fed by his obsession with Daisy and his mistaken belief that he can reclaim the past and her love, shifts the narrative away from any meaningful sociological analysis. What we find is a neurotic love story with two people caught up in the arms of fate. Fine as a theme for a party because of the colorful and inviting nature of the era, the strong psychological narrative deflects from the cultural analysis because Gatsby’s neuroses is universal and does not relate to or depend on any sociological context to occur. The 1920s was a period too vibrant, too creative, and too complex to be captured by a novel as narrow in scope as Gatsby.

II

The 1920s, A Vibrant Era

Most people, understandably, associate the 20s with the Wall Street crash of 1929, the image of the Flappers, or the spiritual malaise popularized by authors like Hemingway, and Eliot. The twenties, however, were a seminal period of change for America. Major shifts in economics, social norms, and technology marked a break from the Victorian era leading to the establishment of the foundations of the modern age. 

The economy was booming during this period. A 42% growth in the US real GDP between 1920 and 1929 is cited as a historical benchmark by numerous economists including California State University, at Northridge. More refined measurements beginning after the post-war recession of 1921, saw the economy growing at an annual rate of 4.1 to 4.2 percent.  By 1929 the average annual income was rising by almost 30% and the US held 40% of the world’s wealth. 

Driving this growth were a significant number of innovative and technological developments. Chief among them were the mass production of the automobile, due to the adoption of the assembly line, electrification, which allowed factories to switch from coal to electric power, more than doubling their production capacity.  This adaptation to mass production allowed the manufacture and sale of newly developed items such as radios, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators at costs middle income families could afford. 

According to Andrew Sorkin in his book, 1929, “The 1920s more than any other period in our countries history, saw the birth of the modern consumer economy that we take for granted today.”  Creating the market for the mass-produced convenience items mentioned above was a vast rural to urban migration. Millions of people left farms and small towns for higher paying jobs in metropolitan areas. The 1920 census showed, for the first time, that more Americans lived in metropolitan communities than in rural areas. 

Sorkin emphasizes that “the greatest product, the one that made all the others possible, was credit. Buy now, pay later. It was a kind of magic.” In 1919 General Motors began selling its cars on instalment plans followed by Sears who established installment purchasing for the sale of its products.

Seeing the opportunity, Wall Street began offering stock on credit. Buying “on margin,” it was called. As Sorkin tells it, “By the thousands middle-class class Americans opened margin accounts putting up 10 to 20 percent of the stock purchase price and borrowing the rest. When the market went up the returns felt like easy money.” And along with credit came speculation in the stock market. It was a great ride for a while, but the loans with the stock as collateral were call or demand loans.  In the 1920s, total payment of the loan had to be met when the lender (generally a bank) called it in.  If cash was not available, the bank could satisfy the loan by the immediate sale of the borrower’s stock and if the borrower was a depositor, by exercising a right of offset and taking the borrower’s deposits. 

The booming stock market, available credit, and buying on margin attracted unsophisticated stock purchasers into the market. With the combination of these factors in play, it looks as though the seeds of the failure of the Stock Market were sewn into the structure of the process. But let me leave it to Sorkin and other experts to do the granular work of analyzing the 1929 Crash and it’s causes.

The dynamic vitality of the era is also evident in other creative and humanizing developments that occurred in the 1920s. On August 18, 1920, women were given the right to vote when Tennessee became the last state needed to ratify the 19th amendment. It was not easy though. A tie-breaking vote by Representative Harry Burn moved the amendment forward only when he received a letter from his mother urging him to “be a good boy” and vote for the amendment. 

With that vote, women gained a new confidence and threw off many of the cultural shackles of the Victorian age. Hollywood film images today, like those in the four modern color films of The Great Gatsby treated us to “flappers” in their short hair, shorter skirts, and by dancing the Charlston their arrogance of sexual rebellion.

Another catalyst for change was the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Just as many American women threw off the yoke of Victorian mores that bound them and dictated their self-identification, the great internal migration of hundreds of thousands of Black Americans to northern cities, particularly New York, freed them to reject the bondage of racial stereotypes and create a new self- identity based on their African Heritage. It freed them to embrace a new intellectual and artistic freedom of expression. This intellectual and cultural work paved the way for the later Civil Rights political movement. The names of the Harlem Renaissance literary giants of this period are too numerous to list but you will remember some of them: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvy. Brillant writer’s and thinkers all, and with their work, builders of the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s.  It’s the same for music: Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Josephene Baker, were all pioneers of the 1920s music scene. 

In addition to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, another literary movement of this time was the “Lost Generation.” Expatriate writers in Europe as well as others grappling with the spiritual malaise that gripped the post war, post flu generation. These writers are also well known and have stood the test of time. They include Hemingway and Eliot, mentioned above, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Wolf. 

The creative imagination of the 20s didn’t stop with music and literature, however. The large-scale abstract paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, flowers with their anatomical overtones, certainly made us look twice. Salvadore Dali’s most familiar melting clocks, born out of his work in the 20s and painted in1931, prompted us to scratch our heads. Picasso dominated the art world, as he still does. Eclectic of styles, we see Picasso’s classical approach in 1923’s The Woman in White to the cubistic presentation of the Still Life with Guitar in 1924. 

The transformative actions of the 1920s are interconnected and deserve a library of books to analyze their impact on American history. But as innovative and indicative of progress as they were, like any instrument of change, they created division and conflict. 

Darwin’s theory of evolution, for example, was taking hold in the 1920s and clashed significantly with religious fundamentalism (the belief that every word and event in the Bible is literally true). Seen and felt as more than an abstract argument concerning religious belief, evolution threatened the fundamentalist’s core belief in God’s creation of the universe as well as his power that personally supports and directs the course of their lives. 

The Scopes Trial in 1925 was initiated as a staged test case to challenge the constitutionality of Tennessee’s Butler Act which prohibited teaching evolution in public schools.  Scopes was convicted but it was overturned on a technicality. The trial, however, was a public relations defeat for fundamentalists as the national media characterized them as ignorant and unsophisticated rubes. 

Undaunted, creationists abandoned the public arena and built an information network of private collages, media networks, and publishing houses. Then in the 1970s the religious right emerged in politics and preached evolution as a threat to American values. With the energy of new ideas, creationism continued to find a place in a scientific world with the introduction of pseudo-scientific titles like “creation science,” and later “intelligent design.” Academic freedom laws appeared (the freedom to teach creationism through critical analysis methods or balanced treatment arguments) in states, as well as, more recently, parental control approaches. A private education subculture was developed that links creationism with right wing current movements like Christian Nationalism today. 

If the fear that drove the conflict between religious fundamentalism and human evolution was the notion that evolution threatened the fundamentalist’s core belief in God’s creation of the universe as well as his personal involvement in the course of their lives, it was an irrational but deep seated latent prejudice, and fear of “the other” that prompted the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. “The other” being anyone who was not a white native-born Protestant American. 

While the first Klan was basically a violent terrorist organization that targeted Blacks and Civil Rights workers. The Klan of the 1920s set out to be more of a mainstream fraternal body, albeit still a secret organization. And even though it presented itself as a benevolent and patriotic society, its message was clear, keep “America for Americans.” This slogan was used interchangeably with “America First” which has a long political history. It was used by Woodrow Wilson, Charles Lindburg, Pat Buchanan, and now by Donald Trump. Underlying the “America for Americans” and “America First” slogans, the goal for the Klan, was the belief that only native-born Americans were fit to govern America.  Catholics, Jews, Central, Southern, and Eastern Europeans, as well as Blacks were targeted as not being capable. The Vice President even suggested we might measure how American people by the number of generations they’ve lived here. 

With a strong promotional strategy, the Klan reached a high of four to five million members in the 1920s. With this level of influence, it had a significant impact on immigration and the National Origins Act of 1924. Also called the Johnson-Reed Act, it was basically a national xenophobic response to immigration, preventing entry from Asia, setting quotas on the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, establishing the U.S. Border Patrol, and requiring migrants to acquire a visa from a U.S. Consulate abroad. Hover praised the bill, and it was everything the Klan had asked for. 

Then, quickly, it all came down. Disconcerting struggles for power among the top leadership, as well as financial corruption, led to a drop in membership with the coup de graĉe coming in 1925 when D.C. Stevenson, the powerful Grand Cyclops of Indiana, was convicted and sent to prison for abducting, raping, and killing a young woman. Apparently, this ghastly crime shook the public to the point where they found their conscience. Over the next five years the national membership of the Klan dropped from millions to about 45,000.

It was a busy decade, the 1920s, a seminal decade, and we all know how it ended: the stock market crash, followed by the Depression, and a World War with more than 60-75 million deaths caused by the war itself, and war-related effects.  The war also reshaped the world order by diminishing the influence of Western Europe and establishing a by-polar world with the US and Russia as competing superpowers. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and without considering the emerging power of China, the US remains the only superpower.  

III

2020s Parallels with the 1920s

Do They Portend a Crisis?

When we look at the United States today, we find a number of striking parallels with the 1920s. Both decades, for example, emerged from a global health crisis. The Spanish Flu pandemic ended around 1919, while COVID-19, the most recent pandemic remains a persistent threat today. Both events left a depressing wake of anxiety, depression, and lost confidence in the future. And for the US it continues. As of January 30, 2026, more than 1.2 million people have died from Covid 19. 

As mentioned above, the 1920s also saw a great boom in technology similar to our rapid evolution in digital technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI). These rapid developments offered a dizzying vortex of change to be absorbed and managed by the society. Today, economists as well as labor markets are particularly concerned about AI’s future impact on employment. What jobs will AI eliminate and what kind of jobs will it create? What kind of future should we prepare for?

Just as commercialism and debt-driven speculation fueled the devastating economic bubble of the late 1920s, today’s stock market is heavily stimulated by the AI explosion and the aggressive investment in that sector. Some regulatory institutions (The FDIC, and the IMF), banking organizations, and economists have issued concerns about today’s “shadow banking” systems that are used to finance AI infrastructure and data centers. Known by regulators as Non-Bank Financial Intermediation (NBFI) are a large network of financial institutions that provide credit and other bank-like activities outside the regulated banking system. They also do not have the safety nets of traditional banks like FDIC insurance or direct access to Federal Reserve emergency funds. Yet these institutions hold assets of $256.8 trillion, according to the Financial Stability Board (FSB).  The US is the largest holder of these assets, followed by China. Is there cause to worry here?

Wealth distribution in the US remains highly concentrated. According to Federal Reserve Data, estimates are that the top 1% of the US population owned roughly 34% of the nation’s wealth in 1928. This is compared to data that shows a record 31.7% in the third quarter of 2025, while the bottom 50% held 2.5%.  There are several reasons this unequal wealth distribution is unhealthy for the nation.  Lower- and middle-income families tend to be the nation’s consumers while the wealthy lean towards saving or investing their funds. This narrow top-level concentration can cause consumer spending to stagnate reducing market demand. There are also political disadvantages as a smaller number of people have access and influence over policy makers. As we see today, money is power. And lastly, concentration of wealth creates an unlevel playing field making it more difficult for lower and middle-income families to participate in the advantages offered by a democratic society, like high-level education. When I asked my wife, Marilyn, why she thought a third the nation’s wealth held by one percent of the population is a concern, without a second thought, she said, “Because it makes it easier to get the next third.”  

Xenophobia and racism have long been currents running through American society. Sometimes underground in a quiet flow they bubble to the surface as a kind of fashionable racism. At others, they overflow their banks like raw sewage.  In the 1920s they prompted intense nativism, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the passage of the National Origins Act, which established the first immigration quotas. Today, these tensions are mirrored in the President’s openly racist, brutal, and lawless deportation policy that calls for the removal (deportation?) of one million people per year for the next four years.  

So, the question arises, do these parallels, and our current response, portend an economic and cultural collapse in the ensuing decade like that following the 1920s?

Some say no because of the economic, technical, structural, as well as humanizing reforms that have been put in place to preserve the country’s institutions and to support and safeguard the public. Examples include: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) created after 1929 to regulate financial markets and protect investors; margin requirements that require 50% down on stock prices to reduce the risk of “margin call” liquidation, rather than the 10% of the 1920s, and on the humanizing side the current safety net structures like welfare, food support systems, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and of course health insurance help support the larger percent of the population. 

Because of the unpredictable and erratic nature of the Administration, however, others feel that these reforms and humanizing programs put in place after 1929 could, on a whim, be placed in jeopardy today leading to a significant economic and cultural crisis in the future.  

IV

Trump and the Decivilizing Process

Steven Miller, Homeland Security Advisor, on January 26, 2026, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, stated the governing principle of the current Trump administration. 

“You can talk all you want, Miller said, about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

What is shocking about this statement by Miller is that it denies more than 300,000 years of human evolutionary history that hardwired psychological factors of compassion into human nature. Steven Pinker in his The Better Angels of Our Nature offers a view of human nature in which factors of cognitive reasoning, empathy, common sense, and a moral code, were rooted in our human nature by evolution over those years. These “better angels” of our nature form the backbone of the civilizing process.

Miller is correct that there are pernicious psychological factors that are part of our nature. Pinker identifies these as predatory violence (used to exploit or intimidate others), dominance (the urge for authority, prestige, and power), revenge (the desire for retribution), and sadism (the infliction of pain for no reason other than pleasure).  Finally, he notes that ideology can be used to justify violence as well. (For a detailed look at Pinker’s theory of human nature, see my essay “The Better Angels of Our Nature and Violence in the Second Trump Administration), published on this platform November 22, 2025.)

Thomas Hobbes would probably agree with Miller. In Leviathan, he argues that “all are motivated by the instinct for self-preservation to maintain their own freedom while dominating others.” To manage this instinct for dominating others, Hobbes developed the idea of the “social contract” between individuals. Under this contract, free people bond with each other to form a civil society in which they all gain security in return for subjecting themselves to an absolute sovereign or assembly of people. Alternatively, John Locke and Jean-Joccque-Rousseau argued that individuals acquire civil rights by accepting the obligation to respect and protect the rights of others, thereby relinquishing certain personal freedoms in the process.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the framers of the Constitution had a better idea: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…” This opening set the guiding principle of the Constitution by affirming that the US government’s authority is derived from the people and that the government is answerable to these people. It is a social contract that binds individuals and states into one country, based on the rule of law. The process itself recognizes that humans have in their nature the creative capacity to form “a more perfect union,” empathy, common sense, a moral code, and reason.

This contract, the Constitution, is completely antithetical to Miller’s implied principle that the social contract has failed, and the world is in a “State of Nature” where strength, force, and power are the governing principles. And as Hobbes says, life in that world is nasty, brutish, and short.

  If you think all this is hyperbole, visit the streets of Milwaukee today.  Confirming his belief in Miller’s view of a non-binary human nature governed only by strength, force, and power, Trump has unleashed a ruthless, undisciplined, private army on the citizenry of that city. An army to perfect his desire to rid the country of those his racist instincts tell him do not belong here. 

This reason may be accurate, but I would suggest an additional motive.  This lawless exercise, as cruel and devastating as it is, might be a strategy to test the will of the American people to resist his total domination as an authoritarian head of state. Mirroring Trump’s authoritarian rule, this army is an instrument unto itself, answerable only to the President, and lethal in its methods. Unhampered by the rule of law, masked, dressed in full military combat kit, it collects, wounds, and kills ordinary American citizens with impunity.  It disappears them in clumsy snatch-and-grab tactics. They are taken off the streets, out of their cars, from stores, from work, from out of their homes, in the course of the everyday tasks of living. ICE says they are after “the worst of the worst criminals”, but in truth, they have demonstrated that no one is safe. To paraphrase Hobbes, where ICE sets its foot, in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in Seattle, life is nasty, brutish, and for some, short. 

Why do we know all this? Because Trump wants us to know. Intimidation is one of the primary tools of a dictator. Besides, why be a bloody authoritarian if nobody knows about it.

The people of Milwaukee are not impressed however, and they are not intimidated. They are organized. A day doesn’t pass without a demonstration against Trump’s tyranny. A day doesn’t pass without people at the sites where Renee Nichole Good was shot three times in her car at point blank range, and the place where Alex Jeffery Pretti was shot ten times as ICE agents stood over him on the ground subdued. People in almost every neighborhood now carry whistles to warn when ICE is spotted. Noise making groups demonstrate outside hotels where ICE agents stay.  “Watchers” are organized and trained to spot ICE agents so they can be filmed when making arrests.

The brutish activities filmed by residents have caught the attention of the of the nation and the world. This is especially true of the videos of the gut-wrenching shootings of Good and Pretti. As the pressure builds, seven hundred border patrol agents are to be removed from the city, some Republicans are speaking out, along with a few celebrities, several MAGA Podcasters and, a few notable athletes. The courage, organization, and endurance of the Milwaukee resistance is making a difference. Approval ratings for Trump are dropping like a rock, and former supporters are beginning to see the Administration as the cruel impulse driven government that it is.

V

The Waste Land

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby became, over time, the popular novel of the 1920s. But T.S. Eliot’s The Wast Land became the poem of the era. Published 1922, it is said by some literary experts that the poem explores the fragmented nature of the spiritual and emotional consciousness of the global post war society. Through many interpretations, the poem stands on its own, however, and one pulls from it what one finds. In defense of the obscurity of some poetry in general, Eliot argues, in his essay on Dante that, “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” For this paper and its discussion, I have chosen one small metaphor from the poem to cast light on the decivilizing nature of the second Trump Administration. It is found in Section V of the poem, What the Thunder Said.

  Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mud racked houses

                                     If there were water

  But there is no water, life-giving, nourishing water. Nothing positive, nothing creative, nothing productive, only dry thunder comes from the mountain echoing his name. Amongst this rock, things come so fast one cannot even stop and think. On top of each other, the demands arrive: the purchase of Greenland and the forced annexing of Canada as the 51st state, the elimination of the Department of Education, the transformation of Gaza’s West Bank into a playground of wealth like Monaco or the French Riviera, the deployment of a Golden Dome for national defense, the nationalization of elections across fifteen blue states, the conquest of Venezuela to seize its oil, enforcement of a Donroe Doctrine that claims the Southern Hemisphere as a private sphere of influence. and the systematic indictment and arrest of former government personnel, the proposed construction of an archipelago of seven detention centers (dare we say “concentration camps?) and the conversion of twenty vast warehouses into holding centers. These are just a few of the President’s impulse driven desires. And the list goes on. 

Yet still, there is no water. This Administration is a dry waste land where nothing grows. 

VI

Churchill, 

November 29, 1929

On October 6, 1929, Winston Churchill arrived in New York for an eight-week excursion to the west coast and return. According to Andrew Sorkin in his book 1929, the itinerary of the trip was arranged and paid for by financier Bernard Baruch who arranged for Churchill to meet the titans of finance as well as celebrities and politicians. While traveling Churchill became enamored of the stock market and acted on his desire to invest. 

On the eve before his return to Britain, November 29, he sat and counted his financial losses. Sorkin tells us that like everyone else, Churchill lost money in the Crash. He didn’t lose confidence in the American people, however, or the system set up by the US. According to Sorkin, what Churchill saw in his trip was a quality of resilience, an unshakable faith in a golden future, that he did not see at home. Sorkin quotes from a piece Churchill wrote about the Crash and his view of the American people. 

No one could doubt that this financial disaster, huge as it is, cruel as it is to thousands, is only an episode in the march of a valiant and serviceable people who by fierce experiment are hewing new paths for man and showing all nations much, they should attempt and much that they should avoid. 

Churchill is primarily reacting to the Wall Street Crash here, but he is also responding to the spirit of the American people he found on his trip west. A valiant and serviceable people, a quality of resilience, an unmistakable faith in the future, Churchill could also be talking about the resistance to ICE in Minneapolis, a people of courage hewing new paths and showing all of us how to confront the present Crisis. They are the bringers of life-giving water to the rock-strewn waste land of the current decivilizing Administration.