A severe drought is threatening the Hoover Dam Reservoir

[View in browser]( [Mother Jones Daily Newsletter]( July 16, 2021 It's been another banner week for the Trump Book Phenomenon™. As we noted in Monday's newsletter, the Washington Post's Carol Leonning and Philip Rucker are about to publish I Alone Can Fix It, which promises a behind-the-scenes look at Donald Trump's final year in office. (The Post has already published [an excerpt](.) This comes on the heels of Michael Bender's just-released Frankly, We Did Win This Election, yes, another inside story into how Trump lost the 2020 election. Not to be outdone, Michael Wolff is about to come out with his third book on the Trump era that, you guessed it, focuses on the chaotic last days of Trump's White House. Phewwwww. Now, that's all good and fine, I suppose, but a [question I posed back in September]( still grates: Just how bored do you have to be to actually open up your wallet and purchase these books? Let's break this down once again: A relatively new phenomenon in the annals of presidential administrations, so-called Trump books are consistent commercial triumphs, and it’s unsurprising that publishers are keen to keep riding the wave. "However you feel about the president in political terms or existential terms for what he might do for or to the country, he makes great copy," Eamon Dolan, an executive editor of Simon & Schuster, told the [New York Times](. But when the subject is Trump, a man who often appears physically incapable of exercising any restraint, the insatiable appetite hits strangely. After all, what more can be evinced from insider accounts about a man who doesn't keep anything close to the chest, whose horrifying nature is routinely up for public consumption anyway? The appeal reflects a deeper emptiness among an audience hyper-vigilant to the unprecedented nature of these times but who apparently depend on these books for further saturation. Sure, such accounts might make for a good headline, but is a perverse boredom behind their overwhelming popularity? Why not just surrender to an almost-algorithmic release of artless literary offerings to choose what you do with your spare time? Still not convinced? MSNBC's Hayes Brown raises a [good point today]( highlighting the problematic nature of these accounts: My ire is focused on the sources for these journalists. Time and again the political creatures in Trump's orbit kept silent until it was too late to do anything. I'm still fuming over former national security adviser John Bolton's decision not to testify in Trump's first impeachment trial, only to [confirm that all the charges against Trump were true]( in his tell-all book, which was released over a year later. Similarly, it seems like maybe — just maybe — a lot of the information provided off the record to Leonnig, Rucker, Wolff and Bender might have been useful for senators in the second impeachment trial. We all want to wring some sense out of these chaotic times. But [as I wondered back then](, rather than mainline some salacious details from the Trump era, wouldn't some alternative reading material do the soul better? Anyway, [Luster]( still rules. —Inae Oh P.S. And speaking of Trump driving books sales: MoJo's Monika Bauerlein touches on the chaos of the last several years and why the news [slowing down a bit]( could be a good thing. It's all a part of our big fundraising campaign that ends tomorrow. If you haven't yet, now would be a good time to read her post, and if you can, [support our team's work with a last chance donation]( to help us hit our goal by tomorrow. 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