Trump 2.0 Goes Gatsby: Billionaires Party While Trying To Starve Millions

June 2025 might be the Great Gatsby moment of the Trump 2.0 era, with two monstrously tacky wanna-be American royalty parties costing between 45-55 million.

The Daily is outside-the-Beltway journalism for the people. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber.

June 2025 might be the Great Gatsby moment of the Trump 2.0 era, with two monstrously tacky wanna-be American royalty parties costing between 45-55 million dollars contrasted with pro-democracy protests by the People around the globe.

Tinpot Trump’s Birthday Parade

First, it was Donald Trump throwing himself a massively over-hyped $45 million birthday parade funded by the taxpayers because he held it on the same day as the anniversary of the army and conflated himself with the military as a wannabe dictator will do. Trump has been longing for a military parade since 2017, when he attended the Bastille Day parade in France. Naturally, Trump wanted to "try and top it,” because Trump has no taste or dignity to compel him in a better direction more suited to a democracy.

Trump has long seen himself as royalty, as evinced in the tacky bright gold he surrounds himself with in every home, office, and club he touches — maybe that’s the inspiration for his hair and skin color.

The nouveau-riche social climber and now Republican president has long been described as feeling shunned by the old money in New York City. In typical Trump style, this resentment hasn’t led him to examine himself or try to curate a semblance of taste; instead, he has aggressively foisted upon the country his staggeringly vulgar and gaudy aesthetic in a way that echoes the sexual assault for which a jury of his peers found him liable.

Donald Trump doesn’t try to fit in or learn or grow. He sees what he wants and then he just takes it and mocks anyone who objects, even when what he took was theirs.

In this case, Trump took a birthday parade for himself and stuck the taxpayers of the United States with the bill, while simultaneously threatening Republican lawmakers that they must pass his bill to take healthcare away from poor babies and the disabled.

One could say that Trump is raping America, exactly like we would expect him to given his history rampant with fraud, waste, and abuse.

His underwhelmingly attended parade was a yawn fest punctuated instead by the horrific assassinations of a Minnesota Democratic lawmaker and her husband and their dog as well as the attempted assassination of another Minnesota Democrat and his wife in the morning and a historic and global mass protest against him in the afternoon.

Trump is not American royalty, and he never will be. He’s a tin pot despot defined by his tasteless and inelegant manner on almost every occasion. As president, he routinely embarrasses this country with childish cosplaying at diplomatic events, so insecure and needy that he pushes past other leaders to center himself because he is so sure that the camera will not seek him out on its own.

And he’s right. Trump’s charisma comes from his delusional abuse of power and ability to manipulate people, but he is not any different than the average conman. He’s a less knowledgeable Richard Nixon with a compliant national media and garishly offensive taste.

The Not American Royalty Wedding

As anyone who has had the bad luck to be online for even a moment now knows, Mr. Amazon Prime married Lauren Sánchez this weekend in a wedding that cost somewhere between $46.5 million-$55.6 million.

They did it among protests in Venice against his failure to pay taxes. On the last day of their overhyped nuptials, “hundreds marched through Venice to protest against the exploitation of the historic Italian city.”

And they did it as if they thought they were American royalty, replete with a balcony wave from Mrs. Prime, captured by American Vogue as if this was Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s wedding.

It was not.