Emerson Pieper, contributor

On Halloween, Oct. 31, President Donald Trump had hosted a “Great Gatsby”-esque party at the Mar-A-Lago just hours before programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Food Assistance, and the Head Start program had been defunded. All the while president Trump had previously stated that the government cannot find a way to pay for said programs. The party that he threw was ironically called “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody.” The inspired era for the party, this being the “roaring twenties,” is even more ironic in my opinion because of the fact that that was the era just before the Great Depression. The Great Depression was the time in which the rich were flaunting their money carelessly for proof of status, all while the lower class actively struggled to make ends meet.

Honestly, I don’t think that it is really that far off from a worry that this could cause a country-wide depression again. I think that this party was incredibly tone-deaf, given the circumstances that he is most definitely aware of. Not to mention that he is a large part the cause of the government shutdown and financial problems in the first place. President Trump having so many renovation projects on the White House and having been extremely vocal about them only goes to show how he really doesn’t care about the lower class. I don’t think that there has ever been a time that he has genuinely cared for the lower class of people. This situation that we are currently in really feels like a dystopian world that is created in fictional stories. 

A couple years after the Great Depression, we had actually gone through a period of time that homes and food, really just finances in general, were the most affordable in all of recorded U.S. history. We had better accessibility to funds for Americans to live healthy and in standard condition without overworking every day than we have ever had. This period was quite literally called the “Golden Age.” The Golden Age is generally characterized by a period of great peace, prosperity, and happiness. That time period unfortunately went away around the late 1970s or early 1980s, when Reagan implemented huge tax breaks for the rich. While supporting the rich, he actively cut social programs and attacked workers’ rights that compensated the lower class, who didn’t live in a world of money.

Really, the huge wealth gap between citizens only exists because the rich cannot be satisfied, not because we cannot feed the poor. The rich only get richer, and none of them choose to acknowledge the struggle and stress among the lower class. They simply live a life of selfishness and pure ignorance. This isn’t even a case of right vs. left or red vs. blue anymore. It’s rich vs. poor. It has always been a case of the rich vs. the poor.