However else history comes to judge the 45th president of the United States of America, he will go down as a writer of prodigious, virtually Dickensian industry. Ronald Reagan had his 1965 autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me?. Barack Obama had his early-years memoir and his volume of political thought. But no other president can claim to have entered the White House with a backlist as hefty as the present incumbent’s. Seventeen books bear the Donald J Trump name and (always) the Donald J Trump mugshot in a variety of highly colourised grins and gurns. Stacked on a desk, Trump’s literary output (appropriately enough) towers. Even at 562 pages, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History withers to a speck in its shadow. Big win!
Of course, questions remain about how many of these 17 books Trump has, in any literal sense, written. Each of them is ghosted, a collaborative relationship in which the exact division of labour remains mysterious. Certainly most of us think of Trump these days as temperamentally more inclined to irascible tweets than to protracted meditations in prose. Nor has he ever announced himself to be a particularly voracious reader. It may be that an old joke about David Beckham applies still more firmly to Trump: that he is in the unusual position of having written more books than he has read. So, his literary career is perhaps best considered as forming a parallel with his best work in hotels and golf courses – a licensing and branding exercise in which someone else stumps up the money, further people do the spadework, and Trump gets to pin his name to the project in big gold letters at the end.
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