(RNS) — “I think that your house was where Tom and Daisy Buchanan lived.”

So said the late author Kurt Vonnegut when he attended a benefit for the American Civil Liberties Union at the home of friends in an old mansion in Sands Point, New York, on the north shore of Long Island.

Sands Point had a starring role in “The Great Gatsby.” It was East Egg, where Tom and Daisy Buchanan lived. Jay Gatsby lived across the bay in West Egg, which was Kings Point.

Vonnegut was pretty sure F. Scott Fitzgerald had visited that historic home and had used it as the “model” for the Buchanan residence in his classic novel. Vonnegut had strolled out to the dock overlooking the water, and imagined the view from the end of that dock would have been Daisy’s view of Gatsby’s mansion on the other shore. (Vonnegut might have been wrong; the owners of several other Sands Point mansions have also claimed to be living in “the Buchanan house.”)

Recently, in honor of its 100th anniversary, I reread “The Great Gatsby.” I had always loved it. I liked the movies “Gatsby” inspired, especially the Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio versions (I have not seen the current show on Broadway). The dynamics of social class have always fascinated me, so I found this fable of the nouveau riche and old money to be particularly compelling. I especially found the darkness, the shadows surrounding Jay Gatsby — who he really was, what he really would become — to be fascinating.

And yes, there is the Jewish element in “Gatsby.” Gatsby’s mentor is a Jewish mobster, Meyer Wolfsheim. He is supposedly based on Arnold Rothstein, the racketeer who reputedly fixed the 1919 World Series. According to Ron Rosenbaum, Wolfsheim/Rothstein was “the Jew who violated the innocence and despoiled the purity of an iconic American institution. He was the Jew who corrupted baseball — of all things.”

Wolfsheim is a classic antisemitic caricature — a grotesque presence. Fitzgerald described him as “small flat nosed,” with “tiny eyes,” with his nostrils sporting “two fine growths of hair.” Here is the worst: He wears cuff links made from the “finest specimens of human molars.”

So, there you had it: the image of the demonic Jew. It is an image that still exists today.

But this time, when I reread “Gatsby,” I realized there was much more going on than I had previously realized.

I saw that “Gatsby” is about America today.

Or, to put it this way: 100 years of “Gatsby”; 100 days of Trump.

Consider this scene. Tom Buchanan is extolling a book that he had read, “The Rise of the Colored Empires.”

“The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved,” he parrots.

That book is based on a real book by Lothrop Stoddard — “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy.”

According to Wikipedia, that book describes:

the collapse of white supremacy and colonialism because of the population growth among people of color, rising nationalism in colonized nations, and industrialization in China and Japan. Stoddard advocated Nordicism, racial segregation, and general racism, restricting non-white immigration into white-majority countries, restricting immigration of non-members of the “Nordic race …” A noted eugenicist, Stoddard supported a separation of the “primary races” of the world and warned against miscegenation, the mixing of the races.

Sound familiar? It should. Here is what should haunt us: In 1925, as those words were flowing from Fitzgerald’s typewriter, those theories were already gaining currency in Germany. In less than a decade, those words would become lethal.

That ideology has not disappeared. It is alive and well, and growing in this country. 

That is one of the “gifts” of Trump’s first hundred days. The Trump administration uses racism as a tool and as a weapon.

But there is another passage that grabbed me.

It is in how Nick Carraway describes Tom and Daisy Buchanan:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Fast forward to David Brooks, writing in The Atlantic:

If there is an underlying philosophy driving Trump, it is this: Morality is for suckers. The strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must. This is the logic of bullies everywhere. And if there is a consistent strategy, it is this: Day after day, the administration works to create a world where ruthless people can thrive. That means destroying any institution or arrangement that might check the strongman’s power. The rule of law, domestic or international, restrains power, so it must be eviscerated.

Once again, the Trump administration. These are people who “smash up things and creatures, and then retreat back into their money and their vast carelessness.”

Smashing up things and creatures: the economy, the rights of legal immigrants, due process, the universities …

These are careless people.

The big question is: Who will be the people who clean up the mess they had made?

Reread “The Great Gatsby.” It is, of course, an American classic, a perennial favorite among high school students — a quintessential American story about class, ambition and pretension.

And then ask yourselves: How do we reclaim America from the casual racism of its leaders?

And how do we reclaim America from careless people?