The American Dream and Its Discontents

We have 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 MAGA question: can Donald Trump make America Gatsby’s again? As in: The Great Gatsby, published in 1925.

Sarah Churchwell.

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 she has.