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Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse, a biweekly dispatch from the nation’s capital about all the strange rituals of the local tribespeople, known as Swamp Creatures. If you’re new here, this letter is just the beginning of a new media company focused on bringing you the inside conversation from Hollywood, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington, D.C. I’ll have a little more information for you next week about how the company is coming together, but in the meantime, if you like what you’re reading, share the love—and this sign-up link.
Today we tackle the last installment of my series on how Washington has and hasn’t changed in the six months since Trump attempted a coup. If you missed the previous installments—about how no one flunks out in Washington and about White House reporters’ rocky transition from covering a “circus with flaming chainsaws to … an old man watching his dog”—just follow those links.
And now: the never-ending supply of Trump books, post-Trump.
“It's a Race to Avoid Woodward”
As Election Day approached in the fall of 2020, Wall Street Journal White House Correspondent Michael Bender wasn’t sure how to feel. On the one hand, after five years of all Trump everything, he was wrung dry. On the other, he had a book about Trump to write. It was his first book and he had gotten a small advance so he wasn’t counting on a blockbuster, but every writer wants their book to succeed, especially if it’s their first. “Personally, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to happen,” Bender told me when I asked him if he had ever considered what a Trump loss would mean for his career. “If, like most Americans, I were voting with my pocketbook, I would vote Trump to win because that’s job security and he’s a great story. But I was just so exhausted.”
Turns out, he needn’t have worried. After his book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election, was officially published on Tuesday, it rocketed to the top of the Amazon best-seller list. It was joined there by two other Trump books: I Alone Can Fix It, by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Loening, and Michael Wolff’s Landslide. (The books were numbers four, one, and three, respectively. We’ll find out where they land on the New York Times’ best seller list next week.) Of course, the reason all their books have come out now is that there is another one debuting in the fall, this one by a monster of the journalistic and publishing worlds: Bob Woodward, whose two previous Trump books were massive best sellers. Fear, his first Trump book, sold nearly a million copies in hardcover and another 20,000 in paperback; his next book, Rage, sold over half a million in hardcover. One industry insider estimates that Woodward made at least $4.5 million on Fear alone. (These are numbers from Book Scan, an industry tool that gives a rough estimate of book sales. The numbers are also impressive, considering that you might not realize, as I didn’t, that a Times best-seller isn’t necessarily a book that sells millions of copies. “You can be a New York Times best-seller if you sell 15,000 books in week one” and then not sell any afterwards, said one book editor. “In publishing, the numbers are just smaller than in other means of mass communication,” another book editor explained.)
Given those figures, many publishing houses that had Trump books in the pipeline decided to offload them during the summer so as not to be crushed underfoot when Woodward’s new book dropped. “The sense from my publisher was that everyone was trying to avoid Bob Woodward and coordinating their entire fall rollout around him,” Bender told me. “Because why wouldn’t you, he’s a force of nature. It’s a race to avoid Woodward. We’re all stepping on each other this summer. Even people like Wolff and Rucker and Carol, who have multiple Pulitzers and best-sellers under their belts.” (Wolff, by some estimates, made $13 million off of his first Trump book, Fire and Fury.)
After Woodward, there is at least one more Trump best-seller in the works. New York Times White House reporter and all-star Maggie Haberman is currently at work on a Trump tome, for which, I’m told, she got a healthy seven-figure advance. Maggie didn’t want to comment on this or about how this new book deal came to be after her first book deal, with Times colleague Glenn Thrush, fell apart when Glenn was accused of sexual misconduct. Maggie returned her advance, but Glenn kept his—and, apparently, Maggie’s agent, the superagent Elyse Cheney, kept her commission, which led to what their friends and colleagues refer to as “a breakup.” There are even rumors that Maggie sued Elyse, although both deny this.
For the first two or three years, industry insiders told me, it seemed that every book proposal was about Trump, and almost every book about him was a runaway best-seller. But Trump is out of office, so why are there still so many Trump books and why are they so successful?
One answer is technical: The contracts for all the above-mentioned books were signed before last November’s election, when it wasn’t clear if Trump would or would not continue living in the White House. But it was not guaranteed that they would sell so well after Trump’s departure, especially given so many people’s very loudly professed Trump exhaustion. “I am surprised, to be perfectly honest with you,” said one very important book agent when I asked them if they expected sales of Trump books to be so brisk months after the end of Trump’s presidency. “I would’ve bet the ranch against this had you asked me a month ago.” A book editor in New York told me, “There are so many fucking Trump books, it’s hard to keep track of them!” Others, like political journalists in Washington who turned down tantalizing offers to write Trump books, are feeling a little differently. “Does it drive me crazy to watch some of these people make all of this money and do all this promotion? Sure,” said one White House reporter, before consoling themselves with the knowledge that their weekends are now free of Trump.
The other answer is more political: Trump is out of office, but he is hardly gone. “I see a lot of prognostications on how much influence he’s going to have, and that he might run again,” the book editor said. “His ideas are still out there and still virulent, so there might be a kind of lingering interest.” Another book editor told me they would seriously consider bidding on a book on Trump and Trumpism, depending on how the 2022 midterms go. In fact, most people in publishing I spoke to said they still have an appetite for Trump-adjacent books. Their only exceptions seemed to be publishing memoirs by former Trump officials looking to launder their reputations, and a memoir by Trump himself. “I could never in good conscience expand his platform or allow him to profit further off of the damage he’s done to this country,” says the book editor. “Not to mention the fact that there’s no way it wouldn’t be a complete fantasy and fabrication.”
Of course, there’s the question of what, if anything, we’re learning from these books. Sure, we’re getting new details—about how Trump told his chief of staff John Kelly that Hitler did some good things, or that Gen. Mike Milley was planning a mass resignation of generals should Trump try his hand at a coup—but are they really telling us anything that we don’t know? Did we not already know that Trump is a deeply racist man who flirts with fascism? Did we not know that his administration was wildly chaotic? Or that there was lots of yelling? That any adults in the room were always plotting—and failing—to rein him in? “I don’t know what there is that is new for anyone to know about this man,” said the agent. “The idea that his administration was chaotic and crazy can be a surprise to absolutely no one. But these books get enough dramatic details to drive the daily news, which then drives them to the top of the Amazon list.” Or as one industry insider quipped the other day, “What are we going to find out in these books? That Trump threw a banana at John Kelly?”
One book editor who read an excerpt of Rucker and Loening’s book told me that, though they were gratified at the quality of the reporting and writing, they were underwhelmed by the lack of any seismic shift in their understanding of Trump. “I found it fresh and novel in micro terms but not in macro terms,” the editor said. “Was it out and out revelatory? No. But then again, our jaws have been scraping the floor for the last five years.”
America is now neatly bifurcated into pro- and anti-Trump tribes. The former reads books from their own universe, books that reflect their own fears, insane as they may be. (The #2 book on this week’s Amazon best-seller list is Fox News host Mark Levin’s Marxism.) They have their own publishing houses—or their own imprints at the big publishing houses—and they’re not going to read reporters they see as enemies of the people, people they think make a living by trashing their favorite president. So who’s reading all the Trump exposés? “It’s largely people who didn’t vote for him,” said one book editor. “It’s general political junkies of all stripes, some of it is a #resistance contingent,” offered another publishing industry insider. “The same ecosystem that was amplifying those books is still working. There’s still the CNN-MSNBC-NPR outlets who are going to be reporting what was reported in these new books,” and that drives people to buy it.
But the book agent I spoke to made a really compelling point: “Isn’t it fascinating that people who are his avowed critics will still pay money to spend time with him?” This made the agent speculate as to what these sales actually mean. “I sometimes wonder if these books are bought after reading an excerpt and thinking, wow, this is juicy! And then it sits in the Kindle without getting read,” the agent mused. “It probably doesn’t matter much for the publisher’s or the author’s bottom line, but I wonder how much readers are actually engaging with these books.”
But many other people in the publishing industry understand the phenomenon of people who hate Trump buying and reading books about Trump as a strange form of catharsis. “Trump is a terrible man who makes for some wonderful storylines,” said the book editor whose jaw has been scraping the floor. “For all sides, his presidency feels more urgent and relevant, and it had a deeper effect upon us than any other presidency in my lifetime. The one thing that unites us is that we all lived through it. It’s almost as if people want to relive the relief—and relive the trauma as a way to purge. I’m talking about mass psychology here, we don’t all have a therapist we can go to as a nation, so I think the next best thing is revisiting the trauma, revisiting the relief, and processing them.”
“Throughout the Trump presidency, people consumed these books like they were some kind of emotional salve,” said another person in the book business. “Another way to look at it is that these books were as much a part of the dumpster fire as Trump was. The energy that was consumed to hate on Trump needed fuel. And these books provided a lot of that fuel. We saw this in the Bush years, but it was never like this.”
Of course, the journalists and academics who have written or are writing Trump-adjacent books see this differently. “With the caveat that history is not going to care about how many shouting matches John Kelly and Corey Lewandowski got into, then yes, of course it’s a subject worthy of continued scrutiny,” said New York Times Magazine writer Robert Draper, who is now working on a book about the Republican Party after Trump. “Trump is the most consequential one-term president in the history of the Republic.”
“I think it’s very important to document what happened,” said New Yorker writer Susan Glasser, who, along with her husband and Times White House correspondent Peter Baker, is working on a history of the Trump presidency. “Parts of the picture need to be filled out. There were terrible things that happened that weren’t really understood. People on the right don’t want to focus on what happened and there are people on the left who also want to move on, but I’d like my information about what happened in Helsinki, please.”
“They’re absolutely necessary, I read almost all of them, and I think they’re very valuable,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at N.Y.U. and author of Strongmen, a book that places Trump on the historical spectrum of authoritarian leaders of the last century. “It’s very important to write about his character. What we’re reading now confirms the worst: Trump thought Hitler was great, and repeatedly called for journalists to be executed. That’s important information to have. We haven’t begun to digest everything that happened in part because of how the Trump administration ended.” Plus, says Ben-Ghiat, who is a specialist in Italy, there is a dark precedent for not fully reckoning with the messiness and drama surrounding these strongmen. When Italian politician (and Putin mentor) Silvio Berlsusconi finally lost power, “the center-left just wanted to turn the page and change the focus because he was just so overwhelming.” But without the necessary accounting and consequences, Berlusconi returned to power just a couple years later.
And yet, Ben-Ghiat points out, the media has to walk a thin and treacherous line in counting Trump’s many sins. “The media does well with Trump stories and Trump books, which need to be written and should be publicized, but it’s all a chain of clicks and a chain of attraction, which helps the sales and reviews,” she told me. “It’s a media cycle created around the figure of Trump. Is it bad for democracy? Yeah. It feeds his ego and allows him to feel relevant. It bolsters his resolve to stay relevant, and makes him more money. For his followers, it feeds the fiction that he is still the center of attention.”
“But what’s the alternative?” she asked. “What are you going to do, not talk about it?”
Are the Guardian’s Kremlin Papers Legit?
I spent half of yesterday fielding this question. On Thursday, the Guardian published a story describing a document, apparently signed by Vladimir Putin at a meeting of his closest security advisors. The story purports to show that the document authorized an operation to install Trump in the White House in 2016. The document hits every Democratic erogenous zone: it calls Trump an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”; alludes to kompromat the Russian government had on Trump from one of his unofficial visits to Russia; and says a Trump presidency would bring “social turmoil” to the United States. It sounds absolutely amazing and gratifying, but is it true? The short answer is: we don’t know, but there are at least five reasons to be skeptical.
1. As Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired C.I.A. officer who fought Russian active measures from 2017 to 2019 from inside Langley, put it, “this seems to be packaged too neatly. Kremlin documents like this don’t leak.” On this, I agree with Marc. It just seems too pat and fits the narrative we want to believe a little too neatly.
2. If you know anything about how hard it is for Western intelligence agencies to pry secrets out of the Kremlin, you wonder: how in the hell did the Guardian procure such a sensitive and explosive document? The Guardian is not at all forthcoming or clear about where it came from. Here’s how they describe their sourcing:
Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.
The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking.
That seems extremely vague. And knowing the British press’s much laxer rules on sourcing and verification of information, this makes me nervous.
3. Is the document real, or is it a vbros, a fake document manufactured by Russian intelligence to send us into a tizzy again? I spoke to one former American intelligence agent who has seen the document and reports about the Kremlin meeting. This person told me that an ally's intelligence services reported on the meeting, but that we don’t know if this document was signed then or created later. Plus, they pointed out, it isn’t the substance at issue—we’ve long known that the Kremlin preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton and that they used their intelligence operations to help him achieve victory—but its very release. Was it actually a secret document created for and signed by Putin in that alleged meeting, or was it created two to three years later and released “to shred us apart”? “It looks legit, but for what purpose?” the source said. “It seemed more likely that they leaked this document to make themselves look more powerful than they were and could sow division by manufacturing after the fact. It’s a no-lose game for them in that case.”
“This definitely looks like something the Kremlin could have written and ‘leaked’ for the purpose of making people look ridiculous when it’s published and everyone gets really excited about it,” said one former U.S. government official who worked on Russia. Look, for instance, at the response to the report: the American media is again talking about Trump and whether the election had been rigged by the Kremlin. (Let’s remember that undermining confidence in election security is not an exclusively Republican sport.) Is the document real or is it more Russian disinformation? I don’t think we know enough to answer that question just yet.
4. I really hate to rag on my colleagues publicly and agree with Glenn Greenwald. But Glenn voiced publicly what many of us former Russia reporters have been saying privately. The piece is written by three people, two of whom are great reporters and one, Luke Harding, whose past reporting hasn’t held up to scrutiny. In 2018, he reported that Paul Manafort went to the Ecuadorian embassy for a secret meeting with Julian Assange, but no one else could confirm that the meeting took place and the Guardian later watered down the language of the story, such as by changing “meeting” to “apparent meeting.” Those of us who overlapped with Luke in Moscow remember other stories, like his 2007 bombshell that Putin had amassed $40 billion in his first two terms in office. Amazing story! There was only one problem: Luke’s only source seemed to be the “political technologist” (that’s a thing in Russia) Stanislav Belkosky, a man we all knew as an entertaining peddler of conspiracy theories and someone who made for a fun drinking companion at the bistro where the Russian opposition drank. There are other stories that former Moscow correspondents can share, and, for many of us, a red flag snapped up when we saw Luke’s name on the story. (The Guardian did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Of course, not everyone agrees with me—or with my cohort of foreign correspondents in Russia—but I will say this. I remember one night in Moscow when a young British journalist told me over a beer that his professors had taught him that journalism was primarily entertainment. My American sensibilities were shocked, but it’s something I often think about when I see stories like this in the British press.
5. If the Steele Dossier—another British product—debacle taught us anything, it’s that we should be extremely careful with these kinds of explosive but anonymous documents that make us feel good by confirming our wildest fantasies about political figures we loathe. This is a situation where a grain of salt won’t suffice; get out your salt licker to read stories like these.
Still, for all my skepticism and all my spidey senses (and sources) telling me this is probably bullshit, it’s important to allow some space for the possibility that this document is real. It might be! But it’s probably not. The real issue is, we just don’t know yet. So if you’re a journalist with good sources in the intelligence community or in the inner sanctum of the Kremlin, get on it. If you’re not, take a beat, and think about whether it’s worth sharing information we don’t yet know to be true. That’s always a good policy.
That’s it for today, friends. Remember: Monday is mail bag day so if you have a question you want me to answer, please send it along to fritz@puck.news. Until then…
Good night, tomorrow will be worse,
Julia
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