Donald Trump has “written” several books, including Trump: The Art of the Deal, The Best Golf Advice I Ever Received (the advice was “cheat”), and Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again. That one was published in 2015, a year before he was elected president. It may also be his last book, at least from a reputable publisher.
Politico reports that Trump has been unable to score a post-presidency book deal, something that is unheard of. Even Mike Pence is getting seven figures to write about his love of Garfield, or whatever. “[I]t would be too hard to get a book that was factually accurate, actually,” a book publishing industry insider told Politico. “That would be the problem. If he can’t even admit that he lost the election, then how do you publish that?” Keith Urbahn, president and founding partner of the Javelin literary and creative agency, added that any Trump memoir would be a “fact-checking nightmare”:
Politico reached out to top publishers and editors at the “Big Five” publishing houses — Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, and Simon & Schuster — to see if they had heard anything about any such deals Trump had been offered. None of the sources said they had heard about such potential book offers, and most said they wouldn’t touch a Trump project when he does start shopping a book around.
Naturally, Trump claims he’s received offers from “two of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses,” but he did “not want to do such a deal right now… That doesn’t mean I won’t accept them sometime in the future, as I have started writing the book. If my book will be the biggest of them all, and with 39 books written or being written about me, does anybody really believe that they are above making a lot of money? Some of the biggest sleezebags [sic] on Earth run these companies.”
If Trump doesn’t get a major book deal, maybe he can tweet out the pages he’s already written. Oh wait.
(Via Politico)