“The idea that we’re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous. Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war in the Pacific, or against some European combination!”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1927

Surely Donald Trump wasn’t thinking of The Great Gatsby when he said he wanted to Make America Great again, though Gatsby is a great novel and its major character is as fake as anything about Fox news and the president himself. No major 20^th century American writer, not Theodore Dreiser, nor John Dos Passos was more conscious of the friction between social classes than F. Scott Fitzgerald. No novel of the 1920s is more class conscious than The Great Gatsby, and no writer was more aware of the loss of American greatness than Fitzgerald. Had the novel been published with the title that the author preferred, Under the Red, White and Blue, readers might have sensed that America is the main character in the novel.

Two years after the novel was published, Fitzgerald told a reporter, “The idea that we’re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous. Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war in the Pacific, or against some European combination!”

The Great Gatsby might have provided a kind of morality tale for a society that was cracking up. The once spectacular continent is decimated, trees cut down to make way for houses, rivers polluted, and innocence corrupted— all that and more is spelled out in the pages of the novel. But when the stock market crashed in ’29 and the Depression of the 1930s hit families hard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great Jazz Age novelist, fell out of favor with the literati and the populi.

After all, he wrote about members of the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat and not about the exploited and oppressed, either. “I can’t stand being poor,” one of his characters says and speaks for the author himself who was more intellectual than his image would have it, influenced by Rousseau, Marx and Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class. Fitzgerald’s characters consume conspicuously.

In The Great Gatsby, which celebrates this year the 100^th anniversary of its initial publication, no one toils in a factory or on a farm. For decades, critics such as Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling and others have raked the novel over red hot coals, but they haven’t killed it or even synged it. The main character, Gatsby, is the quintessential self-made man, an exemplar of the rags-to-riches meme, a bootlegger who fictionalizes his life. Indeed, he claims to have made his money in drugs and oil; how contemporary is that! Gatsby isn’t his real name. It’s Gatz. He’s also the archetypal boy in the novel’s boy-meets-girl story who falls in love with the girl and loses the girl to a man with old money.

Nick Carraway, the narrator and the only real friend Gatsby has, lives on suburban Long Island and commutes to a job in Manhattan, though Fitzgerald doesn’t describe his working life. Fitzgerald glamorizes Manhattan. “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world,” he writes. The other main characters include Jordan Baker, a female golfer who cheats at the game, and Tom and Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy couple so wrapped up in their own selves that they’re indifferent to the pain and suffering of others. Daisy gets away with murder, or at least with homicide.

Her husband is a blatant white supremacist who worries that colored people will steal the world out from under from men like himself. Were he alive today he’d have voted for Trump and Vance and he’d support tariffs on goods imported from Asia and Europe.

On the other side of Fitzgerald’s economic spectrum, there’s George Wilson, a mechanic who operates a garage in a polluted landscape with toxic water and unhealthy air. Fitzgerald doesn’t describe Wilson working on cars or pumping gas, though its clear he gets his hands dirty. He’s the only character with a gun, and one of the villains of the piece, a jealous husband and a sharp-shooter. A snazzy car also figures as a murder weapon. Meyer Wolfsheim, a gambler and a criminal, has made his reputation because he has fixed the World Series. In Fitzgerald’s fictional world as in Donald Trump’s everything can be fixed with money.

One might say of the wealthy characters in The Great Gatsby, as Balzac once observed, “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” Still, Fitzgerald doesn’t describe the crimes behind the fortunes; what he’s after is satirizing the wealthy after they’ve made big money.

The satire is out in full force in chapter four in which the narrator describes the guests at Gatsby’s parties who belong to a whole social class. You can practically hear Fitzgerald seething just below the surface. “From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the state senator and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen…all connected with the movies in one way or another. And G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. (“Rot-Gut.”) Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly — they came to gamble, and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.”

To execute satire properly it helps to have some affection for the individuals who are satirized. Fitzgerald certainly felt some affection (along with envy and resentment) for the wealthy, especially wealthy white women like Daisy Buchanan.

In the company of the fast crowd with its luxury cars and flashy clothes, Fitzgerald was aware of his own shabby attire and “poverty.” Indeed, the author himself was a sucker for beautiful women who had money to burn. His wife, Zelda, was one of them. Before Zelda there was a teenage debutante named Ginevera King who stole Scott’s heart. He never entirely recovered.

Fitzgerald’s great theme in The Great Gatsby and elsewhere is loss: the loss of illusions, the loss of love and innocence. Two antithetical feelings feed into one another in the novel: grief and nostalgia. Fitzgerald wanted to return to the past, to turn away from the horror of World War I and the glamour of the Jazz Age. At the same time he knew that it was impossible to go back in time.

Gatsby dreams of a happy life with Daisy. What he doesn’t know, Fitzgerald writes, is 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.” Fitzgerald admires Gatsby because he’s an eternal optimist who believes in “the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” The last sentence in the novel reads, “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Gatsby’s illusions are shared by his fellow citizens.

To Trump and his cronies, Fitzgerald would say, “forget about making America great again. That’s a lost cause.” He certainly doesn’t long for a return to the untrammeled west that is defined in a seminal passage in the novel by “the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon.”

You may have read The Great Gatsby in high school or in college. Since its initial publication few novels have been on as many required reading lists for students as Fitzgerald’s class conscious saga. But you might have missed the poetry, the reflections on power and corruption and the contemporary relevance of an American classic.

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