There’s a long line of authors outside Mar-a-Lago waiting for their turn to talk with former president Donald Trump, and he has been obliging them. According to Axios, since leaving the White House Trump has given nearly two dozen interviews to authors of 17 books that are in the works about his chaotic presidency.
A big part of the reason for Trump talking as much as he is doing is to help control the narrative and keep him in the news leading into the 2022 midterms, when he hopes to be a big influence on election results. His advisers say the large number of books being written to chronicle his administration demonstrates interest in Trump is still strong.
Per Axios:
“Trump makes each author feel they’re getting something special. And some of them are: Many of the nuggets will definitely make news. But there appears to be quite a bit of overlap in the “scoops” Trump is dishing out.”
The next year and a half will see a number of Trump books debut, with one of the first likely being Michael Wolff’s “Landslide,” due out July 27. Journalists such as NYT reporter Maggie Haberman and ABC’s Jonathan Karl also have books on the former president in the works. Karl, whose previous book “Front Row at the Trump Show” was a bestseller, has reportedly already talked with Trump on the record for 90 minutes. The one book that Axios says Trump did not do an interview for was the one by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Woodward’s last book, “Rage,” made headlines because Trump admits in it that he purposely downplayed the serious of the pandemic at the start to the American public.
Of course, a good number of these upcoming books will likely paint similarly unflattering pictures of Trump and his time as president.
In the upcoming book “Nightmare Scenario,” Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta write that in the early days of the pandemic, Trump wanted to quarantine Americans with COVID-19 in Asia at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
“Don’t we have an island that we own?” the president reportedly asked those assembled in the Situation Room in February 2020, before the U.S. outbreak would explode. “What about Guantánamo?”“We import goods,” Trump specified, lecturing his staff. “We are not going to import a virus.” Aides were stunned, and when Trump brought it up a second time, they quickly scuttled the idea, worried about a backlash over quarantining American tourists on the same Caribbean base where the United States holds terrorism suspects."
The book chronicles the chaos in the White House over trying to get a handle on the pandemic. The authors conducted interviews with more than 180 people, including multiple White House senior staff members and government health leaders. It examines the power struggles over the leadership of the White House coronavirus task force, the personal feuds that crippled cooperation and the efforts by a host of staffers to prevent Trump from acting on his worst instincts.
“That was what the response had turned into: a toxic environment in which no matter where you turned, someone was ready to rip your head off or threatening to fire you.”
“Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History” will be available for sale June 29.