It's telling that this year's Halloween party hosted by Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago was themed after F. Scott Fitzgerald's great novel. The well known "Gatsby illusion" refers, however, to the central theme in The Great Gatsby, highlighting how Jay Gatsby builds a magnificent, but false, identity and life around the idealized, unattainable dream of winning back Daisy Buchanan, ultimately revealing the hollowness of the American Dream and the era's moral decay through his self-created fantasy and tragic end. The novel eerily foreshadowed the American stock market crash of 1929, only four years after its first publication, and the then ensuing Great Depression. Just image today's incumbent of the White House being presented with either happening...
