Breakfast in America, an album by the British band Supertramp, hit America 40 years ago this month. Though it was Los Angeles to which the band had emigrated, the mythic landscape depicted on the album jacket is New York Harbor viewed a from an airplane window. Lady Liberty is a smiling diner waitress (the actress Kate Murtagh) holding a voluptuous glass of orange juice on a small tray; her other hand holds a menu. In the background, the island of Manhattan is depicted with diner dishes and service-ware—salt and pepper shakers, coffeepots, egg cartons, ketchup squirt bottles, napkin dispensers, stackable mugs, syrup pitchers, ashtrays, pourable sugar jars, even Aunt Gemima—all of it ghostly white. The aloft orange juice is directly in front of a Twin Towers made of stacked mini cereal boxes.

All ten songs on that album are good. There’s something especially sly about the oompah-band-meets-snake-charmer title track: “Take a look at my girlfriend (girlfriend) she’s the only one I got” (boom-boom-boom). Breakfast in America was the only rock sheet music I bought for the piano outside two volumes of Beatlemania. I succumbed because I wanted to play “Take the Long Way Home,” a sad song about a middle-aged guy regretting his life, thinking what he might’ve been if he had had more time. I liked the way it sounded, and I can’t tell you why this album made more of an impression on my teenage mind than ELO or Queen or Pink Floyd.

What recently conjured up Breakfast in America was rereading the “malaise” speech that Jimmy Carter delivered in July 1979. I don’t remember hearing anything about the speech that summer, but I do remember they were playing Supertramp everywhere you went on your bike (“Goodbye, stranger, it’s been nice”). What Carter did in that speech that was considered so colossally bad was broach the truth about breakfast, lunch, and dinner in America: “First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course.” The President basically tells the people that a cookie is a sometime thing when that cookie is oil.

If speeches are meant for uplift, this one did the opposite. Carter the Christian is obviously appalled by what he sees—and for that reason he should probably not have been president. But in bemoaning our lack of trust in government, he presciently called out behaviors that were only just beginning to get greased up: “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption” and “every extreme position [in Congress is] defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another.”

Just like today, few Americans back then wanted either the truth or compromise. What they wanted was more and more of that big-balled “take a jumbo / ’cross the water” Breakfast in America America. They didn’t want a preacher nudging them toward grownup choices: “We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose.” In this anguished prelude to Ronald Reagan, no one wanted to shine a flashlight on our deteriorating systems. It was much easier to cry “bad leadership” than confront the end of a postwar economic surge that was later shown to be a statistical anomaly. We wanted to believe that corporations and Wall Street would give us Morning in America where it’s breakfast all the time.

In January 1979, so did a 32-year-old real estate “promoter” named Donald Trump (“I’m a winner / I’m a sinner / Do you want my autograph?”). Using inherited money, Trump purchased the flagship building of the ailing Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue at 56th Street for $15 million. The 12-story limestone and granite building was designed by Warren and Wetmore, the architects of Grand Central Terminal, and completed in 1929. Its first tenant opened for business eight days before the stock market crash. After its failure, Bonwit Teller bought the building.

No one expected Trump not to demolish the Art Deco building to erect his signature 58-story (or 68-story if you do Trump math) glass-fronted tower. But he had promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art that he’d preserve two Art Deco relief sculptures and some intricate grillwork from the Fifth Avenue façade. Instead, he shocked New York’s art world by jackhammering the sculptures off of the building and losing the grillwork. He had no apologies, claiming that saving the sculptures was not worth the expense to him. (It’s telling that the sculptures depicted women scantily clad in scarves.) And lest you think him guilty of mere cultural crimes, he committed various actual crimes during the construction of Trump Tower by financially exploiting and endangering the health of undocumented Polish workers.

The Bonwit Teller building was definitely born under a bad sign, getting the whack in the year of its golden jubilee. But those 50 years coincided with the New Deal era. Trump jackhammered the Art Deco ladies on June 5, 1980, five months before Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide, ushering in a decade of government downsizing and deregulation, corporate tax cuts and tax cuts for the wealthy. Margaret Thatcher immediately became his privatization prom date, and New York City was a transatlantic playland for both the wealthy in Concordes and commoners in jumbos.

When Trump Tower opened in October 1983, its doormen were dressed like Buckingham Palace guards—an image straight out of Breakfast in America: “Can we have crumpets for breakfast, mummy dear, mummy dear? / Gotta have ’em in Texas, ’cause everyone’s a millionaire.” Jimmy Carter was a million percent wrong when he tried to feign optimism in 1979: “We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” Au contraire! Donald J. Trump was only just starting to pile up his material goods (“Take a look at my girlfriend”).

But then again, nothing was what it seemed in Trumpland. The year after TRUMP TOWER with its 34-inch-tall gold letters became the decade’s paradigm for self-indulgence and consumption, Trump began his ill-fated quest to build up 150 or so stories and live at the very top. He never stopped trying to make a reality of his talking point that “New Yorkers want to have the world’s tallest building,” even when scheme after scheme failed to pan out. By the mid-1980s, people were on to him: they could see how he used outlandish development proposals merely to hype his stature to the creditors he desperately needed when his projects began to founder. He liked telling people he wanted to live in a penthouse “above the clouds,” but who really lives above the clouds except someone on a plane? someone always arriving or departing, ascending or descending to keep five steps ahead of the banks?

Whatever witches’ brew America began stirring in 1979, it’s given us the ailments we suffer with today. That summer, Carter had no idea that his words would conjure years of what Arthur Miller called “the Reagan trance,” which somehow lasted throughout the Clinton administration. America finally started to realize the price being paid after the election of George W. Bush—after 9/11, the bogus Iraq War, the disastrous response to Katrina, and the Great Recession. But when more disaster came calling in 2016, they were happy to turn over the deed to a swindling serial bankruptcy machine under the excuse that they no longer trusted government. When Supertramp put out those ten songs four decades ago, America, the world’s spectacle of glitz, really did have two paths to choose. At that crossroads, there was still a retaining wall between glitz and, say, the Lincoln Memorial. But the path chosen was the one where glitz is transformed into a core value. Forty years on, all retaining walls have collapsed, just like the towers behind that voluptuous glass of orange juice. §