Do those books even sell?
Like I'll be on Amazon and I'll see the Mary Trump book or the Bolton book "recommended" to me and they'll have a nice little "Best Seller" tag on them.
Now I'm well aware of how pathetic the criteria for the Amazon and NYT bestseller lists are, you can move 80,000 copies in a nation of 330 million and be declared a great influencer after all.
But since this kind of crap is your thing I'm wondering if you've ever done a deep dive on this.?
Every time that a politician or a politically-important figure writes a book, it's possible that they intend to use it as a way to take bribes or to help launder money. One of the best examples of this was James Wright, the Speaker of the House in 1987. He wrote the book
Reflections of a Public Man, which was really just a bunch of excerpts from his speeches. On the surface there's nothing wrong with that, it's just
boring. The problem came when the House Ethics Committee found that
97% of his book sales were sold in bulk to special interest groups.
It got a little stranger due to the publishing arrangement and the
abnormally high 55% royalties paid to Wright, because the book was being published by one of Wright's friends, William Moore. Moore had gotten in his own share of trouble after a stint in jail in 1975 for misappropriating union funding by delivering payoffs to politicians, on behalf of the Teamsters PAC, whose president was Jimmy Hoffa, oddly enough.
The House Ethics Committee's concern was that this book sales agreement was being used to completely bypass the normal limitations placed on speaking fees, as every time that someone wanted to effectively bribe Wright, all they needed to do was buy a shitload of his books rather than dump abnormally large fees on speaking arrangements, which was how bribes used to be handed out before these limitations. Given that only 3% of his book sales were legitimate, non-bulk, non-special interest sales, the HEC was right to be suspicious, found him guilty, and he promptly resigned.
Politicians don't typically take overt bribes anymore. That's actually
very rare. They got smarter in the 1980s and they've refined that system exponentially ever since,
especially since the Clintons. There's a reason that every single politician under the fucking sun has a charity in their name and pumps out new books like paper's going out of style, and it's not because they're generous people nor is it because they have anything useful to say.
Michael Cohen may not be a politician, but he's a lawyer from New York who's already done some skeevy shit in his time. A book deal should not come as a surprise to anyone. Granted, this isn't to say that
every single book deal means that a person is using it to effectively take bribes, but politicians sure write an
awful lot of books compared to most people, don't they?