I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source with a key, finally, to the mystery of Donald Trump and where he came from.

He was born almost exactly 100 years ago in the imagination of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald.

What he stands for by now is a sort of magear question.

Can Donald Trump make America Gatsby's again? As in the great

Gatsby, published in 1925. The book makes every list of great American novels, but it's more

than that. It's a high style satire and prophetic tragedy about a dreamer who invented not just a fake self,

but a whole cast of rich, mostly repellent characters and wannabes all around him.

Those famously careless people who smash things up for as long as they can

and then let other people clean up their messes.

Our guest Sarah Churchwell is not the first to make the Gatsby-Trump connection,

but nobody has mapped it as broadly as you have, Sarah.

It's not just those two famous names and men,

but it's the eras and the ideas that drive them.

I read your brilliant essays in the Financial Times, and I come to know you as a Chicago-born American

teaching the humanities at the University of London.

How did you come to link Trump with Gatsby

and the ideas, large and small, that drive their stories.

I was chuckling a little bit when you said I wasn't the first because in one sense I was

one of the first because I've been doing it since 2015. And, you know, since Trump came on the

political scene, really, I had just finished my book about Gatsby at that point, which came out

in 2013, 2014, when

Trump came along, one of his early slogans before Make America Great Again was, of course, America

...