An alternate title to this article could easily be, "If you've heard Donald Trump's speeches, you've essentially read his book."
Or even, "We read Donald Trump's new book. We didn't have to."
That's because his new Crippled America doesn't exactly break new ground. It reads like one of his TelePrompTer-free campaign speeches: loose, casual, disjointed and full of grandiose adjectives. You can almost hear him dictating it as you read his greatest-hits lines about "real Americans" and the economic threats that China poses to the U.S., mishmashed with a rundown of his policy proposals.
So what's the point of even writing it? He gets at it just a few pages into his book.
"The cost of a full-page ad in the New York Times can be more than $100,000," he writes. "But when they write a story about one of my deals, it doesn't cost me a cent, and I get more important publicity."
Crippled America isn't exactly a real-estate deal, but it's the same idea — Trump did a moderately newsy thing, and his face ended up on news channels and websites.
Lots of people took notice — cable news networks played his Tuesday-morning book press-conference live. The book gave him another excuse to get behind a lectern, and the news media gamely paid attention.
Not all campaign books are so blunt, however. ("Either we're fighting to win or we're going to continue to be big losers.") Or willing to go all-caps. ("I have proven everybody wrong. EVERYBODY.") But on a basic level, lots of them do the same thing — they give a campaign more publicity. Saying something new or innovative is often secondary.
"I've often wondered who buys these things," said Aaron Crawford, a post-doctoral fellow at Southern Methodist University, who is studying presidential memoirs.
The campaign book and the presidential memoir are, admittedly, different. (One is written after all the campaigning is over.) But they have both essentially become messaging tropes.
It wasn't always this way, Crawford adds. Once upon a time, presidential candidates' biographies and autobiographies served an important function on the campaign trail.
"It grew out of the campaign biography tradition in the 19th century," he said, "when you had writers create a really good campaign biography and introduce the public to this person, because no one knew who he was."
Contrast that to now, when many of the candidates are already household names, with YouTube videos of stump speeches just a click away. A book hardly seems necessary, in the information-dissemination sense.
But then, the book provides a route to more publicity. Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who has vaulted to the top of recent polls, has essentially (and legally) been using his book tour as an extension of his campaign, as NPR's Sam Sanders has reported.
And it also can help in re-framing a campaign. Case in point: Jeb Bush likewise released a book this week — an e-book called, "Reply All," told largely through his emails written as governor of Florida.
As with Trump's book, there haven't been major revelations from Bush's book just yet. Rather, it seems to function as a part of his campaign revamp — a way for the flagging candidate to tout his record as governor and recast himself as the "joyful" warrior he once said he wanted to be on the trail. After all, his book opens with a chapter called, "This is Exhilarating" and ends with one entitled, "This Job Gives Me Great Joy!" as the Associated Press points out.
Importantly, the memoir of a retired public servant is a different animal from the memoir of someone with more races to run. This is an important distinction the New York Times' Peter Baker made in a review of Hillary Clinton's 2014 Hard Choices.
"Perhaps it's more fitting to compare her memoir not with the diplomatic histories of other secretaries of state but with the pre-campaign books of other would-be presidents," he wrote.
Because her book was setting the stage for a campaign instead of telling about the life of a diplomat, Baker seemed to set the bar a bit lower on it. (Nevertheless, he characterized Clinton's book as a "safe and unchallenging volume, full of bromides and talking points.")
As for Trump, the timing of his book release could be a strategic decision; his poll numbers are slipping, while Carson and Marco Rubio have inched toward center stage.
Still, while Crippled America may fill the same purpose as any other presidential candidate's campaign-trail book, Trump probably wins the award for frankness. Just as he talks about the joys of free publicity, he admits to inflating his rhetoric for political gain.
"[S]ometimes I make outrageous comments and give them what they want — viewers and readers — in order to make a point," he writes. "I'm a businessman with a brand to sell. When was the last time you saw a sign hanging outside a pizzeria claiming, 'The fourth-best pizza in the world'?!"
The question for Trump now is whether a brand built on outrageous comments can carry him to the White House.
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