Did you hear that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is writing a book? Have you preordered Kellyanne Conway’s memoir? Does your book club have Mike Pence’s forthcoming title on its calendar yet? How about the highly anticipated insight into Big Tech, from Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri-born undergraduate history major who has never worked in big tech, but was, for a span, a lawyer who specialized in defending religious liberty? What if I told you that the book will almost certainly contain a chapter whining about how people are always trying to cancel him?
Could any of these books possibly compare to what has come before, the giants of the genre? Like, say, the Twain-esque turns of phrase in the written work of America’s sweetheart Sarah Huckabee Sanders? What about the instant classic that Omarosa wrote? Could anything match the thrills and chills of The Room Where It Happened, wherein John Bolton took 592 pages to observe that Donald Trump was a bad president? It’s a surprise he didn’t borrow the title Infinite Jest instead.
It seems like I can’t even open Twitter without seeing a slobbering media reporter breaking news of a massive book deal for a political D-lister who I can’t even imagine having five minutes’ worth of questions for, much less 300 pages’ worth of interest in.
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And yet, the parade of puzzlingly high-ticket Trumpland book deals continues. Who reads this crap?
I don’t care how much money Kellyanne Conway is telling The Daily Wire she’s getting paid on background. I don’t care how many times Mike Pence appears on Fox’s various female leg-themed programming options to look constipated above a lower third trying its best to find something newsworthy in his ghostwritten drivel. I do not and cannot believe that any significant number of people who aren’t professionally required to read these books are actually planning on spending any time actually looking at the words on the pages.
Here’s why: While we know that conservative It Boys sell a lot of books, we can surmise that very few people actually read those books.
It’s fairly well-known that the makeup of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list isn’t the work of individual readers flocking to bookstores. Rather, the Grey Lady’s anointed list is often the work of bulk-buying by political interest groups. By Vanity Fair’s count, 17 nonfiction bestsellers last year came from such Faulknerian literary talents as Sean Hannity, Candace Owens, and the Thomas Jefferson of word-slurring, Judge Jeanine. Even Ted Cruz did some time atop the bestseller list, and, to paraphrase Al Franken, everybody fucking hates that guy.
Organizations like the RNC, individual political campaigns and PACs, and even businesses owned and run by big political boosters who are committed enough to the cause of getting their favorite guys on the bestseller list, pull stunts like buying thousands of copies of Dinesh D’Souza’s latest literary turd, all in the name of making it look like a lot of people care what they think. The Art of the Deal owed its long reign atop the bestseller list to market manipulation.
Campaign laws restrict a candidate’s ability to directly profit from bulk buys by their own campaign. So why do this at all? Tricking people into thinking that loads of other people care about what you think is one of the most important skills in political media. And after a writer is a “bestseller,” authors of said hack jobs can fetch more money for subsequent books, speaking fees, cable news contracts, and Cameo messages customized for potty training 4-year-olds. To put it simply, conservative political arms use the bestseller list like a giant MORE MONEY button they can hit over and over again on behalf of their most treasured toadies.
No, Mike Pence isn’t cashing a big novelty check because actual human beings are beside themselves with anticipation to throw him in their beach bags and spend the summer soaking up his mental drippings like a piece of crusty baguette. Book contracts are doled out based on how many books will sell, not whether those books will be read.
We know that these books don’t owe their sales to individual consumer choices. But I also believe that these books aren’t actually read by many human beings, for a few reasons.
First, and this is anecdotal and may be borderline Peggy Noonan’s Romney wins yard-sign forecast, but it’s part of a larger picture: I haven’t seen anybody reading conservative bestsellers in public (Jordan Peterson books are the sad exception).
Some bestsellers achieve legitimate pop literary ubiquity. It was impossible to walk through a dentist’s lobby over the past couple of years without seeing at least a few people reading The Vanishing Half, Educated, Mexican Gothic, Michelle Obama’s Becoming, Caste, White Fragility, Untamed or one of the interchangeable thriller blockbusters that contain the word Girl in the title. I realize that the mixed-income eastside Los Angeles neighborhood where I live might not exactly be a place Don Jr. would have made a stop on his book tour, but I’ve never seen a single person in public actually reading his New York Times bestselling book Triggered. I’ve never seen anybody reading Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, or even that “best seller” that Dana Perino wrote about her dog. Even the county where I grew up in western Wisconsin, which flipped to Trump bigly in 2016 and slightly less bigly in 2020, I’ve never seen a Trumpland coverline.
But observations of a blue state coastal elite aren’t enough here. I also looked at some public library lists of books that people checked out most in 2020 to see if people were lining up to read the wisdom of, say, Pete Hegseth in a way that was commensurate with its bestseller status. The New York Public Library’s list of most-borrowed titles included Becoming, Educated, and White Fragility, but no Dave Rubin anywhere. The Jacksonville Public Library system released its list of most checked-out non-fiction books with two months to go in the year, but, again, none of the 17 conservative titles from the bestseller list made the list of books library patrons most wanted to read (Michelle Obama’s book topped this list, too.) In Colorado, the Aurora Public Library’s list did contain two Trump-related books: Bob Woodward’s and Mary Trump’s, both of which didn’t portray Trump or Trumpism in the best light. One list that measured checked out ebooks from libraries released a top ten list that contained many similar titles to the hard-copy books popular with New York and Jacksonville patrons. And, still: no conservative bestsellers. Weird!
In the thick of the 2008 presidential race, when Sarah Palin was asked what newspapers she read, she told Katie Couric. “Um, all of them.” That answer, read between the lines, means “none of them.” And to this day, it’s one of the truest, regularest things she’s ever said.
Americans, as a population, don’t read much. The typical American reads four books over the course of a year. I do not believe that Americans who read the median four books per year are choosing to spend their precious free time filling their mind with the ejaculations of Newt Gingrich.
It’s likely Trump’s most devoted fans read even less than that. According to a Pew poll conducted in late 2019, 27 percent of Americans had not read any books—in full or in part—in the previous year. The population that read the least was adults with a high school education or less; 44 percent of that demographic had not read even part of a book over the previous 365 days. Men were more likely to report not reading at all than women, as were people over 50 years old. Donald Trump declared himself king of the “poorly educated” for a reason; many of the low-education demographics least likely to read books are the demographics that gave Trump’s Republican party their most ardent support.
It seems like such a cynical exercise to write a whole book—or pay a ghostwriter to write a whole book—aimed toward a demographic that doesn’t read, in the hopes that it will make the bestseller list because an organization is buying boxes of the book that will never be opened. It’s also strange that bestseller lists wouldn’t try to find ways to adjust for attempts at market manipulation, or disqualify massive bulk buys from consideration in a book’s bestseller count. But, it’s a free country, people in book publishing have to feed their families, too.
If nothing else, the strong suspicion that very few people are actually reading whatever tepid fascism Sarah Huckabee Sanders is serving up should provide a little petty comfort. Nothing that is said in any of the conservative bestsellers is of much real-world consequence. Unless, of course, you’re one of the trees that had to die in service of Don Jr’s ego.
