Book publishing’s Trump bubble may be deflating, but the last batch of big-ticket tomes about the 45th president is very much in full swing. And rather than shutting journalists out of the gilded doors of Mar-a-Lago, the former president is cooperating quite generously. One evening last week Donald Trump was swanning around his private club with Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff, introducing him to guests with fanfare, according to sources. Wolff, who wrote not one but two best-selling Trump tell-alls that were seen as highly damaging to the previous administration, has privately described his next book as an account of the last months of the 2020 campaign through the second impeachment.
Though Trump once called Wolff a “mentally deranged author” of a “Fake Book,” all apparently is forgiven as the former president tries to put his stamp on a slew of forthcoming books relevant to his political legacy. Plans for his participation have been taking shape over the past month or so, with top adviser Jason Miller quarterbacking the effort and press staffer Margo Martin scheduling the interviews, sources said. We’re told that New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters has already been down to Mar-a-Lago, that Trump has scheduled an interview with Peters’s colleague Maggie Haberman, and that he also plans on cooperating with the author duos of Peter Baker and Susan Glasser (of the Times and The New Yorker, respectively) and Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig (of The Washington Post). Politico reported that a dozen interviews are lined up. There are also related books in the works from Michael Bender (The Wall Street Journal), Bob Woodward and Bob Costa (the Post), Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns (the Times), Ryan Lizza and Olivia Nuzzi (Politico and New York magazine), and others. The deal, according to someone familiar with the negotiations, is that the interviews are embargoed until the books come out.
“We’re tracking nearly three dozen postpresidency books where he will be the star,” Miller told Politico, which beat us to the punch Wednesday night with a story on the prominent journalists flocking to Mar-a-Lago. Trump apparently sees the interest as a chance to salvage his reputation, with the interviews presenting an opportunity to insert his side of the story into books about his one-term presidency. “It’s important for him to control his own narrative and utilize these mediums to share his thoughts and correct the record,” a former Trump aide told Politico.
Former commanders in chief typically shape the narratives of their presidencies with high-minded memoirs published in the years after they leave the White House. In the post-Capitol-riot environment, however, the conventional wisdom is that no major publisher would touch a Trump-authored book with a 10-foot pole. And so Trump appears to be taking the less common approach of talking to all the people who are writing about him, even though the finished portraits are unlikely to be flattering. He is said to still be bitter that Woodward’s multiple interview requests for his first Trump book, Fear, didn’t made it to his desk until it was too late. As someone familiar with Trump’s thinking put it, “His desire to cooperate stems from the way he feels that he got burned.” In addition to journalists’ accounts, there will be more Trump-oriented books from those in his orbit, such as former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and former first son-in-law Jared Kushner. Another former White House aide and tell-all author, Omarosa Manigault Newman, told Politico that Trump “doesn’t believe in the concept of ‘no comment’” and “feels like there will always be one side of the audience who sympathizes with him.”
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