Something about Melania Trump’s dress at last week’s White House dinner for King Charles and Queen Camilla reminded me of another era. The full-length gown was an understated and elegant design by Dior, and the long white gloves, pulled up above the elbow, triggered a recollection of Jackie Kennedy Onassis at her one and only inaugural ball in 1961, a lifetime ago.
Those of you my age, septuagenarian baby boomers and even older, probably remember where you were the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was in Mrs. Smith’s social studies class in middle school in Allentown, PA, twelve years old and already deeply cynical about politics. “Nixon ordered the hit,” I whispered to the boy at the next desk.
My aunt and uncle, a devout Roman Catholic like Jack and Jackie, were visiting. We huddled around the television, in shock and tears. Little could we know then that we weren’t mourning just a lost leader, but a resplendent realm of taste, good manners, and style—dubbed “Camelot” a month after the tragedy in Dallas. Jackie brought class and top-tier artists and musicians to the White House. She revamped the premises and installed a garden (now lost to Trump’s assaults on the grounds). She spoke fluent French and charmed the pants off diplomats, artists, and heads of state.
Meanwhile, as we discovered later, JFK was charming the pants off quite a few other ladies, but the press, in the “gentlemanly” style of the day, turned a blind eye. (How Kennedy managed his affairs with a bad back is beyond me—Marlene Dietrich reportedly told critic Kenneth Tynan that sex with the prez “was all over sweetly and very soon.”)
And what have we now in the White House? A guy who messed around with a porn star while his wife was at home with their three-month-old baby. A man convicted of sexual assault on a writer in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman. A president who has openly insulted female reporters and whose first candidacy was nearly derailed when a tape of his 2005 interview with “Access Hollywood” surfaced, in which Trump said: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything….grab ’em by the pussy.”
We are living in a new age, my friends. It’s not Camelot, it’s not the Roaring Twenties, and it’s certainly not the Gilded Age of Edith Wharton, that late 19th-century era of stiff dresses and stuffy mores.
I call it the Age of Raunch and Glitz.
But it’s not just Trump. It’s the people he has surrounding him, his Cabinet picks and other top government officials. The creepy donors who are underwriting his devastation of our nation’s heritage, like Jeff Bezos and his tacky wife, who brought her famous silicone breasts in full frontal display to the dinner for King Charles. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been accused of having alcohol problems and physically abusing the women in his life. FBI director Kash Patel uses public funds to fly his girlfriend hither and yon. Former Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem, who once shot her difficult dog, outfitted jets at taxpayer expense and flew her alleged lover, Corey Lewandowski, all over the country in high style. (Meanwhile her lonely stay-at-home husband allegedly had a secret online life that involved cross-dressing, fake boobs, and fetish communities.) Trump’s Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, kicked her husband in the testicles when she was in her old job at World Wrestling Entertainment.
And can we talk about connections with Jeffrey Epstein, the dead convicted pedophile? This is not just raunch, it’s abhorrent criminal behavior in which Trump and some of his buddies have been strongly implicated.
Yes, I know. Alleged, allegedly. But it all speaks to a tone that is as far from Camelot as Dogpatch is from the Bois de Boulogne.
And with raunch comes glitz. Trump has made gold the theme of the Oval Office: “About a third of the walls are now covered in gold — appliqués, frames or other decorations,” a New York Times analysis showed. “His tastes veer toward the gilded, triumphal style of Louis XIV, a theme that shows up in his own properties,” adds the Times report. Humorist Fran Lebowitz summed it up neatly when she described Donald Trump, during his first term, as “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.”
I’m not sure that I would care so much about all this if it weren’t for other matters of aesthetics and the destruction of properties that belong to us, the people.
Trump’s plans for his marathon ballroom have devastated the East Wing of the White House. He has shut down Kennedy Center, supposedly for repairs, after so drastically altering the programming that no one will buy tickets. He has slapped his name on the building and his likeness on passports, national parks passes, and passports. He has successfully pressured Chuck Schumer into renaming New York’s Penn Station for him. He has plans for a massive triumphal arch that will ruin the sightlines carefully established among Washington’s major monuments. I don’t need to tell you that these are common ploys among history’s dictators—Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, et al. Get your name and face out there so everyone knows who’s boss.
Even as we teeter on the brink of fascism, some have called this a new Gilded Age, in which the obscenely wealthy rule society and force an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. The tech bros, among others, are the contemporary robber barons. But here are some gifts the originals left to the nation: John D. Rockefeller built the magnificent museum known as The Cloisters in Upper Manhattan. Henry Clay Frick left us the astonishing Frick Collection, housed in a sprawling mansion on Fifth Avenue, a trove of masterpieces that includes works by Titian, Turner, Fragonard, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and so many more. J.P. Morgan bequeathed a library of music and manuscripts, along with a priceless collection of art. Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of hundreds of branch libraries, including many in New York City.
Yes, they’re almost all in New York. I think there are a few generous bequests from the same era in Washington, DC, and other major cities. But you get the idea.
And what do you think our contemporary robber barons—Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Gates, et al.—will leave to our great nation? I am guessing extensive underground bunkers filled with a bunch of gilded crap, maybe gifted by Trump himself, once he is deposed.
But, aging boomers, we can revel in the nostalgia: “Don’t let it be forgot/That once there was a spot/For one brief shining moment…”
Maybe it will return. Maybe it’s gone forever, like Arthur and his noble knights. Either way, I’m pretty sure I won’t be around to see it
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