Scantily clad young women dancing in tall revolving martini glasses greeted the guests as they entered Mar-a-Lago. Models dressed as flappers with huge white feathers pretended spontaneous gaiety. On Halloween, nine months, 40 weeks, and three days into Donald Trump’s second administration, he celebrated the apex of his image as an almighty ruler by staging a dress-up Great Gatsby party for select club members, Cabinet officials, friends, and family, in a conspicuous display of his omnipotence and invulnerability.
Trump serenely presided as the godhead at his party in homage to the roaring twenties of the twentieth century, as though he had revived its heyday. He certainly had not read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel and comprehended its tragic plot or understood how those ’20s ended in the Great Crash. Historians of the future will mark October 31, 2025, the date of the Great Gatsby party, where Trump basked in glowing adulation, as his peak moment of obliviousness before the deluge.
The federal government was in the thirtieth day of a shutdown that would last until November 13. Trump and the Republicans refused to extend subsidies for premiums under the Affordable Care Act, which would lead to astronomical increases, at least doubling for 22 million people, with millions struggling to pay and 4.2 million losing coverage entirely, according to the Congressional Budget Office. More than a million federal workers were missing their paychecks. With air traffic controllers working without pay, flights to 40 major airports were reduced by 10 percent. Perhaps most alarmingly, especially against the backdrop of a party celebrating 1920s excess, food benefits for 42 million people, including 16 million children, under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, would be cut on November 1.
Trump sat poolside like a sultan at Mar-a-Lago, idolized by his guests, exuding complacency. Seated at his table with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. attorney from the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News talk-show host, wearing a gold headdress, Trump grinned approvingly at a guest dressed in an orange jumpsuit with the words “STATE PRISON” stenciled on the back, perhaps costumed as a migrant about to be deported. (A few days later, Pirro would lose the misdemeanor case she prosecuted before a D.C. jury against the “Sandwich Man,” who threw a wrapped Subway salami sandwich at an ICE agent as a protest gesture.)
Trump believed there could be no consequences for whatever he wished to do—whether it was to send the military into American cities, impose tariffs on any country without regard to the Congress, grant pardons to political allies and those with the resources to buy into his family’s crypto business, indict his designated enemies, slash food stamps, increase health insurance premiums, enrich himself to the tune of an estimated $3.4 billion, according to a New Yorker investigation—or order his Department of Justice to suppress the Epstein files.
The more Trump is praised, the greater he believes is his popularity. He trusts in his accolades as a science of alchemy. “I have the best Polling Numbers that I have ever received,” Trump tweeted on October 27. “I have the best numbers for any president in many years—any president.” At that moment he was 14 points underwater, with his disapproval at 55 percent and approval at 41, according to the CNN Poll of Polls. He was 20,000 leagues under the sea, but he posed like he was on the mountaintop.
Four days after the Gatsby party, under a cloud of economic pessimism, chiefly darkened by the betrayal of his pledge to lower inflation on day one, the Democrats swept elections, on November 4, in a wholesale repudiation of Trump and his policies. Trump was more unpopular than he had ever been, even at the rock bottom of his first term, after he had lost the election of 2020 and organized and incited the January 6, 2021, insurrection. All of his gains from the 2024 election were wiped away—and more. It was his midterm election rejection a year before the midterms.
Before Trump had departed Washington for his Gatsby party, he had left behind a White House transformed into a kitsch Byzantine palace, its makeover a symbol of his uninhibited power and his self-proclaimed “Golden Age.” He treated the White House as another of his properties that he redesigned as he wished, his Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac.
With Trump, style follows dysfunction. Gold trim appliqués have been pasted everywhere, the Rose Garden paved over, renamed the Rose Garden Club with colored umbrellas covering tables for lobbyists and wealthy supplicants, an exact replication of Mar-a-Lago, and the East Wing torn down for his monstrous ballroom, to be paid for by corporations seeking his favor for government contracts and to avoid retribution. The symmetrical Federalist design of the White House’s two wings, originally intended to stand as a monument against monarchical pomposity and to reflect the balance of power required to sustain a republic, was being daily defiled. Large cursive gold script was painted on the outside door of the West Wing, which had been unobtrusively built by Theodore Roosevelt, who railed against “the malefactors of great wealth,” now ostentatiously reading: “The Oval Office.” The White House was to be Trump’s second show palace. His new ballroom would have twice the capacity of the one at Mar-a-Lago, for even bigger parties.
Trump had been throwing parties at Mar-a-Lago since he bought the Marjorie Merriweather Post estate, built in the Gatsby era, in 1985. Some of those parties have become notorious, and a number of the parties featured his friend Jeffrey Epstein. But somehow that had been forgotten and forgiven until the week after the Gatsby party, which marked the moment when reality suddenly crashed through the gates. That was when the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a few tantalizing emails from the Epstein estate, followed by a torrent from the Republicans attempting damage control but only providing more shards of highly suggestive information.
If there is a Gatsby in Trump’s story, it is the self-invented swindler and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, though Gatsby seems like an innocent compared to Epstein. Epstein is now six years dead, but he used to be at the Mar-a-Lago festivities frequently. “I was Donald’s closest friend for ten years,” Epstein said. He and Donald lived just about a mile apart in Palm Beach, cavorting together in a blur of debauched scenes.
Like Epstein, Jay Gatsby materialized as if out of thin air. He dressed like an aristocrat in clothes imported from London and spoke as though he had belonged to an exclusive club at an Ivy League college. He was alluring and shadowy. None of the partygoers knew that he made his money through organized crime. He was not Gatsby, his self-invention, but Jay Gatz, raised a Minnesota farm boy, who wished through his pretenses to persuade the wispy upper-class Daisy Buchanan, with whom he once had a fling, to somehow return to him. Gatsby ends up dead, his body floating in his pool, shot by a car repairman who mistakes him for his wife’s lover. Her actual paramour, who directs the killer to Gatsby, is Tom Buchanan, the brutish monied heir and lout, who rants about how lower races will replace white Americans, and Daisy’s husband. He is the closest counterpart in the novel to Trump.
Gatsby’s parties were magical attractions for the bright young things who just came there. Fitzgerald: “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.… Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park.”
Trump’s parties were never like Gatsby’s. The best-documented Trump party at Mar-a-Lago took place in November 1992, with the dancing, mini-skirted Buffalo Bills cheerleaders. In an NBC video that later emerged, Trump and Epstein’s closeness was on display. Trump pumps his fists up and down to the pulsating beat. He stands with several of the cheerleaders, grabbing one from behind and patting her rear. He jumps into a circle of dancers, pulling one against him. Epstein enters with Ghislaine Maxwell. Trump points and whispers in Epstein’s ear. “Look at her, back there,” Trump says. “She’s hot.” Trump bobs his head to the music and bites his lower lip. He says something that causes Epstein to double over with laughter. Trump claps his hands.
When Trump first came to Palm Beach, he appeared at bikini contests in the area held by Hawaiian Tropic, the suntan lotion company. “He was kind of a regular with us,” Ron Rice, the firm’s owner, told The Boston Globe in 2016. “He’d call me up and say, ‘I’m having a big party. Bring your girls in.’ So I’d bring in a bunch of models.”
There was also, on January 9, 1993, the American Dream Calendar Girls festival, featuring 28 models assembled at Mar-a-Lago, but whose only guests were Trump and Epstein. One of the models, Karen Mulder, described the event as “disgusting,” according to the Miami Herald. (Trump’s White House had no comment to the Herald.)
Jill Harth was there as the event’s promoter. Later that evening, she claimed that Trump “forced plaintiff into a bedroom belonging to defendant’s daughter Ivanka (then 11 years old), wherein defendant forcibly kissed, fondled, and restrained plaintiff from leaving.” (Harth filed a lawsuit against Trump charging him with sexual misconduct but subsequently withdrew it in a general settlement that Trump made with her and her husband over his breach of contract involving the Calendar Girls event. Trump’s spokesperson replied in 2016: “Mr. Trump denies each and every statement made by Ms. Harth.” Harth told The Guardian: “They were trying to get me to say it never happened and I made it up. And I said I’m not doing that.”)
Later, in 1993, Victoria’s Secret approached Trump about hosting a photo shoot of its elite supermodels, the “Angels,” at Mar-a-Lago. Epstein was closely entwined with the Victoria’s Secret owner, billionaire Les Wexner, who was his financial angel. Photos published in The Guardian showed Trump and Epstein at a Victoria’s Secret “Angels” party in New York in 1997, and a video captured them chatting and sitting in the front row at a Victoria’s Secret runway show in 1999.
Trump was especially eager for one “Angel,” Frederique van der Wal, to pose in a bikini poolside at Mar-a-Lago. She had one condition, however. “The only thing,” she said, “that you can’t come.” She was already acquainted with Trump.
All sorts of photos of Epstein with Trump have recently come to light, including at parties over the years at Mar-a-Lago. In 2000, they were captured at a Mar-a-Lago party posing as the cozy couples of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and Trump and Melania—with then-Prince Andrew photographed wandering back and forth.
Andrew, as a consequence of his sordid relationship with Epstein as his international door-opener, has been demoted to the mere Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Trump aspires above all to be royalty. But if he were, at least if he were English royalty, which he wishes to be more than anything else, King Charles would have another crisis on his hands. Donald would lose his title (the Duke of Gatsby), the gilded residences, and be known forevermore as Donald Mountbatten-Windsor.
While lines began forming at food pantries around the country, Trump’s Great Gatsby party was a cavalcade of the mummified hangers-on of 2025, not the bright young things of 1925. The thrill of the hunt, with Epstein chasing a lineup of models, was replaced with the procession of the nouveau MAGA royalty kissing the king’s ring. Washington plastic surgeons, who have worked on Trump-orbit clients, have dubbed their look “that Mar-a-Lago face.” One D.C. doctor told Axios that constant Botox and cosmetic alterations create a syndrome of “filler blindness,” where in a world of similarly over-treated changelings, “you lose sight of anatomic normalcy.”
Trump’s guests sat in tables around the pool. Instead of Jay Gatsby’s lifeless body, two large metallic balls bobbed in the water. Trump could not have imagined that they were abstract representations of himself and Epstein, the remembrance of things past.
In Palm Beach, less than a five-minute drive from Mar-a-Lago, at 1100 South Ocean Boulevard, lies an acre of land overlooking Lake Worth Lagoon, where there once stood a historic mansion, designed in the West Indies style, that belonged to Jeffrey Epstein. His estate sold it to a local developer, who razed it. He resold it to a venture capitalist who is building a new house in the Cape South African Dutch style. The address has been changed from 358 to 360 El Brillo Way, as if Epstein and whatever horrors he perpetrated there could be erased.
For months now, more than 1,000 FBI agents have been working at the FBI’s Central Records Complex, instructed by Director Kash Patel to flag and redact Trump’s name from the voluminous Epstein files. “Trump” is being “blacked out,” according to Bloomberg News. The FBI refused to comment.
Flying back from Palm Beach to Washington on November 14, aboard Air Force One, Catherine Lucey, a Bloomberg reporter, asked Trump, “If there’s nothing incriminating in the files, sir, why not …” Trump pointed his finger at her and said angrily, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.” The party was over.
“He had come a long way to this blue lawn,” wrote Fitzgerald about Gatsby, “and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.… So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
