Many years ago, in the crowded corridor of a Manhattan hotel, I was surprised to find myself standing face-to-face with Imelda Marcos, then the first lady of the Philippines. At that time, she was said to possess 3,000 pairs of shoes.

I desperately longed to ask the wife of the dictatorial president, Ferdinand Marcos, why anyone could need all those shoes. And more importantly, why would someone spend so much of her country’s wealth on stiletto heels when so many citizens were so desperately poor? But natural reticence, good manners or simply fear prevailed, and I walked away.

I’m fairly certain that Donald Trump’s shoe closet doesn’t come anywhere near the size and grandeur of Imelda Marcos’s, and yet the questions I wanted to ask her are very much like the ones I now would like to ask anyone who will listen.

Since his re-election in 2024, Donald Trump has earned more than $2bn. Much of it comes from his cryptocurrency ventures. Some derives from the sale of a range of Trump-themed memorabilia: hats, watches, Bibles.

Unsurprisingly for a man who used the small fortune he inherited from his real estate mogul father it to finance a real estate empire of his own, he owns golf courses and clubs, national and international luxury properties and leases that provide a significant chunk of his wealth.

A reported $117m came from legal settlements alone. According to Yahoo finance, his total net worth varies between $6.4bn and $6.5bn, depending on how the markets are doing that day.

So here’s a variation on my question for Mrs Marcos: why would anyone need so many billions of dollars? More than anyone could ever spend on shoes. It can’t be about acquiring some shiny new toy or property. All that money can buy the biggest estates and yachts, a gargantuan wardrobe of blue suits and weirdly long red ties.

So the drive and the thrill must all be about acquisition, accumulation. After all, greed is one of the seven deadly sins. It’s all about the numbers, the power and success that those numbers signify. It’s no longer about how those numbers translate into comfort or pleasure.

Perhaps it’s partly because of some delusional idea that vast wealth can make you immortal. The more you have in the bank, the greater your chances of living forever.

It would be hard to distinguish the amount of money that Trump had honestly acquired from the sums that one imagines flow through loopholes and into his accounts from various elaborate, borderline-legitimate deals.

We have learned some hard lessons about the fragility of some money-making strategies, the cryptocurrency market that can falter and fail, wiping out the hard-earned savings of smaller investors, while those at the top continue to prosper.

The more urgent question is a version of the second one I wanted to ask Imelda Marcos. How can you, in good conscience, continue to amass so much disposable wealth when so many everyday Americans are struggling to fill their gas tanks and avoid losing their homes?

By now we know that charity, generosity and compassion – and conscience – are virtues that our president doesn’t seem to have even in trace amounts.

It’s impossible to imagine him following the examples set by billionaires such as Melinda Gates and Mackenzie Scott, who have pledged and made huge contributions to good causes.

Closely related to the mystery of why one man thinks he deserves and needs so much is the question of how anyone who has ever returned a grocery item back to the shelves after some bad news at the checkout counter can support a man who flaunts his extreme wealth and ignores their worsening hardships.

The only answer I can see is that Trump’s fortune is aspirational. It’s an aspect of the American dream that, despite the evidence, people still hope to attain. If Trump amassed those billions, maybe we can, too. The sad truth is that the income gap keeps widening between ordinary American families and the billionaires who make the decisions that affect our lives.

Every December, faculty members at the college where I teach read Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol aloud, section by section, to a group of students and colleagues. Each year we laugh and cry together as the three ghosts – representing the past, the present, and the future – visit the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge and terrify him into changing his selfish ways.

I tear up whenever Tiny Tim, the handicapped, ill little boy, “did not die” presumably because of Scrooge’s help.

I guess it’s too much to pray for a chain-clanking ghost awakening Donald Trump to the loneliness and grief that he, like Scrooge, may face. Let’s hope that and work so the midterms and the next presidential election function like Scrooge’s ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, showing America how something better than greed and selfishness could look.

• Francine Prose is a former president of the PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her latest book is Five Weeks in the Country