Dear Editor:

“L’etat, c’est moi.” Thus Louis XIV summed up his theory government during the Golden Age of France: “I am the state.”

It was the apex of royal absolutism; the king held court at Versailles and forced the higher nobility to reside there, reduced to fawning sycophancy.

The unbridgeable gap between inherited wealth and abject poverty, famine, and disease provided the tinder for the conflagration of 1789. In the meantime, royal patronage stimulated a golden age of French philosophy, literature, art and music.

A century later, Mark Twain’s novel The Gilded Age captured the corruption, materialism, and wealth inequalities of late-19th century America. Plutocracy eclipsed democracy; ‘Robber Barons’ exploited the working classes and suborned Congress to protect their monopolies; and naked imperialism drove the foreign policy of Trump’s favorite president, William McKinley.

During this period of unbridled greed, however, railroads were built; coal and oil were fueling U.S. industries; and kleptocratic philanthropy enhanced American progress and cultural life.

Fast forward to 2025. In a White House meeting with governors and just two two days after referring to himself as ‘king,' Donald Trump crossed swords with Janet Mills. When she told him that she would follow the law on transsexual athletes, he angrily retorted, “I’m - we are the federal law.”

His juvenile attraction to shiny things is on display in the Oval Office, now tricked out in fool’s gold. From there, he has dismantled federal departments and agencies, defied the Supreme Court, arrogated to himself the Constitutional powers granted to Congress, and smashed global systems of finance, diplomacy and international justice.

What architectural, scientific, or educational achievements offset the self-inflicted carnage of his 51 months in office? The Lee Greenwood Bible? His “beautiful wall”? Detention centers? At the end of Gilded Age 1.0, the French Queen reputedly quipped about starving peasants and laborers, “Let them eat cake.”

Regarding today’s children around the world who are threatened with famine and those suffering food insecurity here at home, many people are saying that he tweeted, “Let them eat Trump steak.”

Bill Hammond

Boothbay