August 5, 2025, 2:07pm
If you’re curious about what’s going on in the heads of our Supreme Court’s most regressive and Trump-loving minds, publishing has got you covered. Three books by conservative robesters are on the docket: Basic Books has a book slated for next year by Samuel Alito, Hachette has Brett Kavanaugh under contract, and Amy Coney Barrett has a book out next month from Sentinel.
Political memoirs are never as revealing as you’d like them to be, so I’m not expecting much in terms of explanation or enlightenment from these books. And as politicians, these Supreme Court Justices are especially bristling, equivocating, and entitled, which doesn’t make for trustworthy narration. What does it feel like to be a person who took an active role in swinging our country away from democracy, care, and freedom? There are probably more interesting insights in this Amie Barrodale short story about the Court getting high together.
It’s odd timing to publish all of these, since the Trump publishing boost seems to have run its course. Books about the regime and its hogmen no longer sell as well as they did. One illustrative statistic from Politico: Michael Wolff’s 2018 Trump book sold over 25,000 copies in its first week, while his 2025 Trump book only sold around 3,000 copies in the corresponding interval.
The sales exceptions seem to be backlist dystopian fiction and books by and for the fascists, that is, right-wing memoir and culture war whining. A flush conservative media infrastructure will probably keep these SCOTUS books profitable and on the bestseller lists. Right-wing slop typically gets a boost in sales from bulk purchases by friendly organizations and supportive, big money goons. This isn’t just a friendly review here and there; they pour money into book projects.
To a publisher, it might be enough to know that regardless of merit, the Heritage Foundation is going to drop a half million on something like “The War on Me: How Woke Is Trying To Make You Say Sorry.”
Most of all, publishers seem eager to recreate the post-2016 world. “Everyone is desperately looking for the next Michael Wolff or James Comey for next year, but it’s not clear there could ever be one again,” one anonymous publisher told Politico. Who “everyone” encompasses in this formulation is giving the game away.
Another anon said, “Part of it is that we were just actually tired of this, and we’re exhausted, and we don’t want to spend 30 bucks and six or eight hours of our time feeling worse.” The exhaustion and boredom is certainly a factor, but these books just aren’t making a strong case for themselves anymore. What else is there to be gleaned from going behind the curtain? What more is there to know about these people? What needs clarifying? At this point all these access books can offer are anecdotes for the sickos and the privileged who are at a safe distance from the regime’s crumple zone.
Maybe in time it will be interesting to know who was getting yelled at and who was getting drunk, but for now, we know everything we need to.