I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source, picking up the pieces of our country in this

Age of Trump, part two. Is the USA still here? Is it still us? Cue Kurt Anderson with his

finger in the wind. I wanted you, Kurt, on a mission to track the spirit of the age, because

you've been a cool, creative, wide-angle eye on events since the 80s

when you founded Spy Magazine and then Studio 360 on public radio. And now you've written the

future already in fiction, forthcoming with a clue in the title. You call it The Breakup. We'll get to

that, but first, I want to know how you're feeling Kurt Anderson in the title. You call it the breakup. We'll get to that, but first, I want to know how you're

feeling Kurt Anderson in your bones, Honeybone included, at this launch of Trump 2. It depends on the

day and the hour of the day, and there's no predicting it. And I feel as though on the one hand, like I think many of us, I want to

turn down the input of enraging moments because there are so many of them. And his strategy,

as president, is to create them, to maintain everyone's attention as much as possible by any means necessary.

That's what he does.

And so on the one hand, I just, from my own sanity, mental health,

I don't wish to pay as much attention as I often have in the last eight years,

but I don't want to pay no attention.

So it's figuring out exactly

what to pay attention to and when to turn up the dial to eight or nine or ten or eleven.

Yeah, this morning, Washington Post says all federal grants are on hold as of today. We don't know

which ones. Yeah. Thank God I don't have any. But I wake

up some days in a panic. The nation of nations that Lincoln called the last best hope of

earth, the empire of freedom we like to think. By now an unrivaled military power on earth and still the sort of eternal adolescent among

nations. I mean, who are we? Well, we are that eternal adolescent. And being an adolescent in

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