Ghostwriting

I HAVE READ NO FEWER than twenty books about Donald Trump, all written by his family members, close associates, well respected journalists, and historians whose area of emphasis is modern American culture. While offering the differing perspectives one expects from divergent writers, they all correlate well, both in biographical facts and conclusions. I began doing this reading after recovering from shock and despair at his ascension to the presidency in 2017. I needed to be informed and forewarned. My favorites are the two by Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame: "The Trump tapes", and "Fear: Donald Trump In the White House". The former consists of transcripts of the twenty interviews Woodward conducted with Trump, and the latter is an incisive examination of interactions between Trump and his staff members during Trump's first administration. During the first administration alone, at least forty five hundred books on Trump were published. Trump has been famous for nearly fifty years, and the books began to appear long before he became president. When he became a television star, the output proliferated. Only a handful of American presidnets have been written about more often. Those include Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Since there is an emerging consensus among professional academicians and historians that Donald Trump already is and likely shall forever remain the agreed upon worst president in American history, it seems probable that many more volulmes will be in agreement in his post presidency, and that the biographical output will continue well into the late twenty first century and beyond, as historical perspective is gained from a chronological distance. Every future writer on Trump will offer a fresh, if somewhat familiar perspective, as is common in this field. Such is the nature of all historical writing, especially biograpy. Future works are not likely to be any kinder to Trump than our early attempts; we tend by nature to be less generous towards historical figures who start their careers in print in infamy. The effects of damage done by nefarious leaders and their cohorts become ever more apparent in the sharp relief offered by decades and centuries of their impact and examination. Trump himself has produced books about himself, about twenty, all ghost written. Not only is Trump not a writer; he is not a reader either. One of his ghost writers, who spent a year and a half collaborating with Trump on "The Art of the Deal", which was published in 1987, remarked that in all the time he spent in both Trump's home and office, he never saw a single book. For some of Trump's books the ghost writer is given full credit on the book cover, on other's the ghostwriter is merely mentioned as having given some assistance, and still others make no mention at all of anyone other than Trump himself. Anyone who has ever listened to Donald Trump speak can readily discern that he is not capable of writing a book on an intelligent, adult level. The problem associated with books allegedly written by Trump is verifying their accuracy, as many of his ghostwriters have indicated. Often they are unable to either confirm or repudiate facts about himself supplied by Trump; they become lost in a morass of vague assertions, grandiose bragging, and incoherent intertwined timelines. Many of Trump's background biographers have mentioned that when ghostwriting a book for Trump, whey were discouraged from attempting to confirm alleged facts, and were simply not allowed to put in print any point of dispute with them. And, needless tosay, book authored by Trump are hagiographic; those written about him by others are uniformaly in agreement about basic facts and about the fact that Trump is a man of questionable moral character. Limited though my personal reading and research has been,and even though I pay close attention to Trump and have for a long time, for me there has emerged a common,irrrefutable theme; I have yet to discern a single redeeming personal quality or personality trait in the man. It seems unlikely that I ever will.