Kremer Corner: Books are not Trump’s Friends

Jerry Kremer

The fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic has wrecked hundreds of thousands of businesses and caused millions of people to lose their jobs. Unless Congress passes another bailout bill, you can expect more businesses to shutter and innocent people to suffer even more. Yet one business that is doing great is the book publishing business thanks to Donald J. Trump.

A recent article in the New York Times spelled out how happy the book industry is thanks to the large volume of books being written about the president.

Based on volume, to date, there have been over 1,200 books about Mr. Trump, most of which have not made him very happy. Contrast that with President Barack Obama who has been the subject of only 500 books, the vast majority of which have been complimentary.

With an election less than 60 days away, if I were the president, I wouldn’t be very thrilled with the avalanche of new books that will be and are making the bestseller list.

To add insult to injury many of the books have been written by either close family, former friends or very capable investigative writers. Every time a new book is announced it puts the president on the defensive at a time when any incumbent running for re-election wants to control the narrative.

The president can yell “hoax” every time a book is announced, but like a dripping faucet, each revelation is capable of causing political damage at the worst time in an election year.

You could imagine how happy the president was when his niece Mary Trump, authored her tell-all book called “Too Much and Never Enough.”

Ms. Trump is a psychologist and her book does more than tell stories. She spends lot of time analyzing the president’s character. Mary is convinced her uncle is a racist and talks about his many statements. That book sold one million copies.

Two of the newest books take aim at the president and his wife Melania. Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, has written “Disloyal” in which he recounts loads of possible Trump misconduct.

The worst of Cohen’s allegations deal with Trump’s remarks about blacks and other minorities. All of his recollections are not only unflattering but portray the president as a very questionable character.

The new book by a former close friend of Mrs. Trump paints very much the same picture of her as others paint of the president. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff was a longtime confidant of Melania Trump and in her book “Melania and Me,” she tells a very sad story of how her friend “threw her under the bus.”

When a controversy arose about expenditures on the president’s 2017 inauguration, Mrs. Trump blamed her friend for the misspent money. Ms. Wolkoff was the Chair of the Inauguration Committee.

Mrs. Trump’s staff dismissed the book as “untrue,” but I know Stephanie personally.

She is a sweet, capable and successful businesswoman. She was very much like a sister to the First Lady and any suggestion that Ms. Wolkoff misused those monies is an outright fabrication. A lot of the donated money was found to have been wasted, but the blame doesn’t rest on Ms. Wolkoff’s shoulders.

Is the barrage of Trump books over?

In the next few weeks, Bob Woodward will unveil his latest book “Rage.” The new inside look at Mr. Trump and the White House, promises to be an even greater headache, six weeks before Nov.3. Woodward is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose books are always filled with hundreds of interviews with people on the inside.

There is no doubt that there are countless people who no longer work for the president or are still there, who have told some pretty juicy stories about his work habits, comments and other dirt.

As we look ahead, the prospects for the survival of many small businesses are very grim. But for the publishing business, books are selling like hotcakes. The president can yell “liar, liar, pants on fire,” but the blows keep on coming and sooner or later a few of them could be politically fatal.

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