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David Remnick
Editor, The New Yorker
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Evidence of Donald Trump’s self-declared “golden age of America” has been confined mainly to the Oval Office, which, in his second term, has been filled with a blinding assortment of golden objects and filigree. Then, last week, we got an even more apt visual metaphor of the era, when a twenty-two-foot-high golden statue of the President with his arm raised in defiance (paid for by a group of crypto investors) was dedicated at the Trump National Doral golf course, in Miami. “The Real Deal - GOLD,” Trump bragged on Truth Social. (Not for nothing, but the statue is, in fact, bronze, coated in gold leaf.)
Photograph by Deb Leal for The New Yorker
Trump has long been fixated by gold, of course, but these days he has plenty of company. The price of the precious metal has skyrocketed—briefly surpassing a record five thousand dollars an ounce earlier this spring—and, as Jennifer Wilson reports from the American West for this week’s special issue, this has led to a boom in prospecting not seen since the days of the forty-niners. It’s being called Gold Rush 2.0.
California’s Route 49, a.k.a. the Mother Lode Highway, which runs through the Sierra Nevada foothills, is bustling again with fortune seekers. But in this modern version of the boom the big money isn’t just emerging from riverbeds or secret mines. It’s also a race for attention. “Today’s gold rush is a #goldrush,” Wilson explains. “On YouTube, prospecting influencers post videos of themselves fending off bears and spelunking down old mines. A content creator with the moniker Pioneer Pauly has an A.S.M.R. video of his hand caressing a pile of gold nuggets. His videos have accumulated three hundred million views.”
Yet, while many of the particulars are different, the central myth—of untold wealth just waiting out there to be grabbed—remains as potent, and as insidious, as it was nearly two hundred years ago. “The original gold rush was full of business tycoons whose success relied on convincing ordinary men that they were millionaires-to-be,” Wilson writes. “Similarly, Trump’s rise to power has been based in no small part on instilling in everyday Americans the idea that they, too, could have riches like his if the country and its laws were just rolled back to an era when men were men.”
Wilson argues that the craze can tell us at least as much about the wayward American man as knowing what peptides he’s taking or the podcasts he’s listening to. (Unless, perhaps, it’s a podcast about searching for gold, of which there are many.)
But the search is more than just an expression of some lost identity. And, when Wilson gets her hands dirty alongside an experienced modern prospector, she gets a deeper sense of the curious thrill of the hunt, and of the dark, weighty power of gold itself. As she writes, “These days, hitting the mother lode looks different than it did in 1849—brand deals, reality-TV guest spots—but there’s still a belief that fortune favors the bold.”
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