A common occurrence during Donald Trump’s presidency was the release of some anti-Trump book, often from an insider with an ax to grind and penchant for fiction.
Apparently, the trend is continuing even with Trump out of office. A couple of books getting headlines in recent days have alleged bombshells from Trump’s presidency.
One book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal, alleges a toxic relationship exists between Trump and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law. It also alleges that Trump said he “made Juneteenth very famous.”
“I’ve done all this stuff for the Blacks—it’s always Jared telling me to do this,” Trump is alleged to have said. “And they all f—— hate me, and none of them are going to vote for me.”
Another book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History by Washington Post “journalists” Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, alleges that Trump suggested sending Americans infected with COVID-19 to Guantanamo Bay during the early days of the pandemic in the hope of curbing the spread of the disease.
We’ve seen this script before. A book comes out with some outlandish claims, a lot of copies are sold to gullible anti-Trumpers, and then we find out the claims were a lot of bunk.
Remember Omarosa Manigault Newman’s tell-all about her time in the Trump White House? That book was promoted as being a potential death blow to Trump’s political viability that would send Republicans running away from him. But the juicy details liberals were hoping would take down Trump didn’t exactly come. Actually, many of the most salacious details were quickly debunked and the book was shown to be as reliable as the Steele dossier. One of the most notable examples was Omarosa’s story that she’d been told by someone that pollster Frank Luntz heard Trump use the N-word.
Related: The Mystery of Omarosa Manigault
Now, Frank Luntz is hardly a Trump supporter, and he debunked this claim on Twitter, saying not only did he never hear Trump utter the slur, but that Omarosa never tried to contact him to verify the story. Kellyanne Conway’s Trump-hating husband also contradicted a claim that Trump had used a slur against him. Between that and other contradictions, Omarosa’s book ultimately tanked in its second week.
Bob Woodward’s book, Fear: Inside the Trump White House, also made allegations that were disputed. The most significant example being that Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly had called the president an idiot. “The idea I ever called the president an idiot is not true. […] This is another pathetic attempt to smear people close to President Trump and distract from the administration’s many successes,” Kelly said about the claim in Woodward’s book.
And then there’s Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff. The book became a huge bestseller, as the media gave the author a ton of free publicity. Wolff confessed that he was “barely a journalist,” arguing his job “has nothing to do with truth.” In short, his book was fiction.
The bottom line: Anti-Trump books sell. Why? Because anti-Trumpers like being told what they want to hear about Trump. That they are being sold a bunch of lies doesn’t matter. If you promised a bombshell tome with salacious details that would destroy Trump during his presidency, the media came running to you and you sold a lot of books. So, more people are trying to cash in on the anti-Trump market. That just makes them capitalists, not journalists.
So, excuse me while I care about something more important than an anti-Trump book. There has yet to be an anti-Trump book that has actually delivered what it promised.
