Even Daisy, idealized as she is, demonstrates the relationship between money and its power to override reality. As Tom’s wife, she personifies the kind of wealth that he possesses and other men can only pursue: In Gatsby’s words, “Her voice is full of money,” which is to say it’s seductive, hard to catch, and compels her listeners to belief, though she rarely says anything she means. At one point, Nick doesn’t notice her insincerity until the moment she stops speaking. When she does, he interprets her smirk “as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged”—signaling the couple’s elite status by flaunting how little they need to care for the truth.

Trump displays a similar carelessness. Amid the cloud of easily disprovable statements that surrounds his administration, he has also, strikingly, used falsehoods to define himself and his office—spinning claims of the largest-ever inauguration crowd and a landslide electoral victory and a record number of Time covers into the mythical biography of a superlatively powerful self. Trump doesn’t appear to care for realism, and maybe that’s the point: Whereas a social climber like Gatsby is meticulous with the details of his self-invention, stocking his library with real books though his guests would not be surprised by cardboard, Trump knows that the secret of power is effortlessness; in his world, as in Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s, wealth means less if you have to work for it. The president inspires loyalty through sheer swagger, telling it like it is even when it isn’t, speaking reality into existence: It is so, because I say so.

What can rouse such complacency into action? Only, perhaps, the notion that what Nick terms the “rather distinguished secret society” of the powerful is under siege. Tom expresses this anxiety early on in The Great Gatsby, when he warns from the head of his own opulent dinner table that “the white race,” having “produced all the things that go to make civilization,” must “watch out or these other races will have control of things.” He wants, above all, to preserve the ease with which he sets the terms of his world—“to ensure,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, “that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification.” Tom is motivated by the same reactionism that Coates has documented as one of the forces that crowned Trump the successor to America’s first black president.

Read more: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the “awful inheritance” underlying Trump’s presidency

Tom’s fears aren’t brought to life, however, until he comes face-to-face with Gatsby—the man who “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself,” whose smile, which “believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself,” reflects back to all who behold it the reification of their dreams. There’s convincing scholarship to suggest that Fitzgerald may have created Gatsby—with his “tanned skin,” close-cropped hair, and studied diction—as a light-skinned black man passing for white, and this, to the white-supremacist Tom, would have been the ultimate insult. It’s enough, though, that Gatsby acts, and leads Daisy to act, on terms that Tom has not defined—so that Tom finds his wife, and all of the wealth and power she represents, “slipping precipitately from his control.”