Editor’s Note: Bill Carter, a media analyst for CNN, covered the television industry for The New York Times for 25 years, and has written four books on TV, including The Late Shift and The War for Late Night. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
I have not read all the books about former President Donald Trump; I can’t even remember all the books about Donald Trump.
I know Bob Woodward has written three. So has Michael Wolff. Sean Spicer wrote one (or was it two?). “Mooch”– that is, Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s White House communications director ever so briefly – wrote one. So did Omarosa, for heaven’s sake. (That’s Omarosa Manigault Newman, for those unfamiliar with “The Apprentice” oeuvre.)
This week marks the release of yet another: New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman’s “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” This adds to an already prodigious total; in August 2020, the Times, citing an analysis by NPD BookScan, tallied more than 1,200 “unique titles” about Trump since his first presidential campaign in 2016.
Of course, that number doesn’t even include the surge of books covering the surreal post-2020 election period, which has pushed Trump-lit to the forefront of publishing over the past two years.
The robust sales for many of these books attest to the hunger among readers to hear every gobsmacking detail about a real-life character who is beyond the imagination of most fever-dreaming fiction writers.
But even ravenous levels of hunger can be sated – eventually. After seven or eight – or 12 – courses, a bit of bloat is likely to set in. With Trump books, it has begun to feel like a never-ending Thanksgiving dinner with more than enough for the family, the cousins, the in-laws and the lonely old neighbor next door – every night.
Every book seems to contain a sufficient number of “bombshell revelations” to drum up media coverage, along with some combination of amusing, enraging or revolting personal details (previously unreported, of course, and almost always disputed by the former president).
These might include Trump acknowledging Covid-19 was “deadly stuff” while downplaying the coronavirus in public statements (Trump said he didn’t “want to create a panic”); Trump staffers finding flushed documents in his toilet (which the former president called “another fake story”); and Trump telling his then-Chief of Staff John Kelly that he wished “his” generals could be more like the ones who reported to Hitler (Trump responded by telling CNBC that Milley and the other generals were “very untalented people and once I realized it, I did not rely on them, I relied on the real generals and admirals within the system.”)
From early reviews, it seems Haberman (full disclosure: her father Clyde Haberman was a colleague of mine at the Times) supplies all the usual ingredients in “Confidence Man,” though no consensus has emerged in the “bombshell” category yet. Maybe that he wanted to bomb Mexican drug labs? Maybe that he claims to have kept in contact with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un? Maybe that he was suspected of impersonating a reporter while he was president?
As for the personal side dishes, they are apparently arrayed in abundance: Beyond the toilet practices, Trump thought about firing his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner via tweet; he called former German Chancellor Angela Merkel the b-word; he thought he could “sue” Congress; he mocked Kushner as “effete.”
But perhaps because “Confidence Man” is coming on the heels of numerous others, Haberman, a Pulitzer-winner who has broken numerous stories on Trump and his circle, chose also to draw on her own experience, emphasizing the augury of Trump’s tabloid-saturated years in New York City and how they shaped the chaotic presidency he imposed on the country.
Of course, like many of the other Trump chroniclers, Haberman has been assailed on social media for the sin of “withholding” information that could possibly have impacted events, if revealed earlier. Starting with the fabled Woodward, these authors have been consistently subjected to this critique. (OK, maybe not Omarosa).
It’s completely understandable if people are outraged by journalists deliberately sitting on major news to enhance later book sales. That sounds antithetical to the first principle of journalism: get the news out.
The other side to this argument is that non-fiction books are inevitably accounts of past events. They are mostly about context and narrative. Having written books like this myself, I know the difference between breaking news and book news.
Is it different when hugely consequential national affairs are the subject? Of course it is. The line can be more difficult to navigate.
Woodward has been walking it, precariously, his entire career. In the case of “Peril,” his latest Trump book (with Robert Costa), the biggest howls accompanied the book’s revelation that Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley called the Chinese to assure them Trump would not go rogue and that the US would not launch a surprise attack. It also revealed that many of Trump’s allies, including Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and Jason Miller, were gathered in a “war room” in the Willard Hotel on the night before the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
How could all this be held for a book rather than reported as soon as it was learned? It was clearly huge news, even though the writers said they did not uncover many of these details until after Trump left office.
It could, in theory, impact Trump’s future attempt at the White House.
But that information is now out – long ahead of the 2024 election.
This may not absolve the journalists, but it’s worth asking: Could this information – or any of the news breaks in these books – have really changed people’s minds about Trump? The other defining aspect of the collected works on Trump is that virtually nothing in any of them – none of the “bombshells” or details about his character – seems to have substantially changed people’s minds about him. That may be because Trump acolytes don’t tend to read critical accounts about him – and his opponents aren’t likely to read the hagiographies.
Given the world’s exposure to Trump in recent years, it seems unimaginable that one more “revelation” of any magnitude could alter the perception of him.
That doesn’t mean they should not be added to the record, or that “Confidence Man” isn’t a worthy addition. What’s been revealed in the bulk of these books about Trump remains historically staggering, and the best of it has been the product of exceptional journalists doing exceptional work.
One other thing is always included in the ritual serving of a Trump book: the pro forma statement of denial from his camp that any iota of what’s in them is true. “Fake news!” – or some version of it – is the claim.
Here’s where the overwhelming volume of this work is invaluable: After hundreds and hundreds of books, is there anything about Trump that could be described as unbelievable?