Vang: Trump’s Great Gatsby moment — partying it up while Americans go hungry

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President Donald Trump threw a “Great Gatsby” party this past weekend at Mar-a-Lago while millions of Americans lost their SNAP benefits. It’s one thing to eat cake and drink champagne while others starve; it’s another to rent a jazz band, pour champagne into a tower, and rub it in our faces while calling it presidential leadership.

We all read “The Great Gatsby” in high school — or at least pretended to. Some of us just watched the Leonardo DiCaprio movie and decided that was good enough. But even those who never got past the SparkNotes version remember how it ends: Jay Gatsby, the man obsessed with wealth and illusion, ends up floating dead in his pool.

I don’t know if Trump read F. Scott Fitzgerald — or reads at all — but he’s clearly mastered one of Gatsby’s tragic flaws: pretending glitter is gold.

Trump’s Gatsby soiree was his Marie Antoinette let-them-eat-cake moment, except the cake was gold-leafed, the caviar imported, and the guest list limited to people who don’t know the price of a gallon of milk. Meanwhile, the SNAP program — born in the 1960s as a bipartisan way to ensure Americans didn’t starve in one of the richest countries on Earth — was being gutted.

SNAP isn’t charity. It’s the reason millions of children, seniors and working parents eat. When those benefits vanish, dinner vanishes.

When my family first arrived in the U.S., we lived off SNAP and school lunches. My parents worked every shift available — cleaning hotel rooms, packing boxes in assembly lines — but minimum wage meant maximum hunger. Those benefits weren’t luxury; they were survival. We didn’t ask for champagne, just rice and a little dignity.

I read “The Great Gatsby” as a student at St. Agnes High School in St. Paul, learning that Fitzgerald himself was born and raised in the same city. It somehow made sense that America’s keenest observer of wealth and excess came from the heart of Midwestern generosity — a place where hundreds of nonprofit organizations, churches, food pantries and other groups across our state are currently stepping up to make sure no Minnesotan goes hungry.

I keep picturing Trump dancing with Melania in a designer sequined gown, pretending to be Gatsby and Daisy, when really they’re more like Edgar Allan Poe’s Prince Prospero and his courtiers in “The Masque of the Red Death.” In Poe’s story, the prince and his rich friends lock themselves inside their castle to party while a plague ravages the poor outside. They think they’ve escaped death until “Red Death” itself walks into the ballroom wearing a blood-splattered shroud. Spoiler: It does not end well for anyone in the castle.

On Monday, Trump’s administration said it will partially fund SNAP for November, but only after two judges issued rulings requiring the government to keep the nation’s largest food aid program running. It didn’t feed hungry families out of compassion; it was forced to do it.

Trump may never have read “The Great Gatsby” or “The Masque of the Red Death,” but the moral is waiting for him at the end of his own party. You can build walls, weld doors and pour all the champagne you want, but hunger seeps through everything.