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As of May 2022, we’ve been subjected to enough inside-the-Trump-administration memoirs to last us an eternity. Could there possibly be any lingering questions about the 45th president’s temperament, level of competence, political beliefs or preferences regarding the preparation of steak? If so, for everyone’s sake, they should be left unanswered, so we can all move on.
At this point, nearly every Cabinet member, staffer and intern has published a book testifying that Trump’s impulsiveness, ignorance of how government works, willingness to use the office for personal gain, seemingly compulsive lying and gratuitous manufacture of chaos were bad for the country. We’re lucky that we’re all still standing, these books repetitively (and obviously) observe. Yet every single one of these memoirs — see: Esper, Barr, Bolton, Grisham — also goes to great lengths to explain that its author did their absolute best to mitigate the damage, lest readers think they were personally responsible for enabling the chaos of the Trump administration. Of course, by all external accounts, the authors were in fact personally responsible for enabling the chaos of the Trump administration.
It’s painfully clear that this genre of self-hagiography is intended as a prophylactic against future criticism. By the time the next presidential election cycle rolls around, the authors hope their reputations will have been scrubbed of association with Trump. (Trickier for some than others; Jared Kushner is currently working on a memoir, and it’s hard to distance yourself from your father-in-law.)
Who is the target audience for these self-serving books, anyway — except perhaps other Trump staffers, whose misery could use some company? Does anyone else really want to relive the years from 2016 to 2020? The number of book buyers who read for masochistic pleasure is surely very small, and even if that’s your thing, there’s vastly more interesting material to plumb out there. You can buy “Medieval Punishments: An Illustrated History of Torture” online for $12.19. Or sample any novel by Sean Penn.
No more Trump memoirs, please. Published and forthcoming alike, put them where they belong: in the remainder bin of history.
Elizabeth Spiers is a progressive digital strategist and writer.
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