{"id":1028,"date":"2026-07-02T22:15:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T22:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1028"},"modified":"2026-07-02T22:15:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T22:15:14","slug":"the-surprising-return-of-the-blockbuster-trump-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1028","title":{"rendered":"The Surprising Return of the Blockbuster Trump Book"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Literary agents and book editors are in the business of selling stories, so drama comes easily to them. Even temporary sales slumps breed alarmist pronouncements; book parties in disfavored genres begin to feel like wakes, sending off one more spirit to the inevitable afterworld of the remainder shelf. The novel has apparently been declared dead 30 times since 1902. But lately, the focus of industry laments has been nonfiction\u2014from highly topical work to the more historically focused \u201cdad book\u201d\u2014which has declined precipitously after a few years dominated by newsy books about Trump and his presidency (even Omarosa had her moment). The trend, if sometimes exaggerated, is certainly real. As of last month, according to BookScan, sales of titles dealing with politics and current affairs were down 19 percent from a year earlier. Yet even as conventional wisdom solidifies around the idea that no one wants to read about reality anymore<\/i>, along comes an exception, perhaps a harbinger of a shift in publishing\u2014or at least in Donald Trump\u2019s position in the collective consciousness.<\/p>\n

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Regime Change<\/i>, a new chronicle of Trump\u2019s second term by the New York Times <\/i>reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, was published last week and quickly achieved stratospheric sales for a nonfiction book. I\u2019m not really in the habit of quoting press releases, but Simon & Schuster is correct in characterizing a book that sells more than 300,000 copies in a week as a \u201cblockbuster.\u201d Most nonfiction books on the best-seller list can get there after moving fewer than 10,000 copies over seven days. For the publishing folks I spoke with, the numbers that Regime Change<\/i> is generating are a genuine source of hope, as well as some head-scratching.<\/p>\n

Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the book in question is nearly 500 pages about Trump. One prevailing industry assumption is that critics of the president are thoroughly wrung out after more than a decade of content about his behavior, his psychology, and the swirl of chaos that surrounds him (never mind the number of Truth Social posts he produces in a night). The too-muchness of Trump and his era has even been linked to one of the recent bright spots of publishing\u2014the double-barreled escapism of romantasy. The first Trump term generated regular best sellers in the Trumpology genre\u2014including Michael Wolff\u2019s Fire and Fury<\/i> and a trilogy from that old stalwart of White House chroniclers, Bob Woodward\u2014but this time around, as the headline of an Atlantic <\/i>article by Paul Farhi put it earlier this year, \u201cTrump Books Aren\u2019t Selling Anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what is happening here? Trump expressed his annoyance with the success of Regime Change<\/i> after receiving what he called a \u201cvery quick and boring briefing\u201d on the book. The agents and editors I spoke with were more sanguine\u2014and not completely surprised. The word I heard most when I asked about the book was cyclical<\/i>\u2014as in, publishing has its ups and downs, and this might provide reason to hope that politics books could be making a comeback.<\/p>\n

The path of Regime Change<\/i>\u2019s success is, after all, a familiar one. Haberman and Swan have one of the biggest print platforms in the world at The<\/i> New York Times<\/i>. About two weeks before their book was published, they shared an adapted excerpt in the paper containing choice tidbits from their reporting, about meetings that Trump\u2019s advisers held in the Situation Room to try to contain fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Laying such a honey trail of details is a tried and tested method of book promotion; think of every Woodward book. It just hasn\u2019t worked so well recently\u2014certainly not for books about the 2024 election, including one by three star reporters that barely grazed the best-seller list. What helped in the case of Regime Change<\/i>, one editor told me, was that, unlike the inner workings of Trump\u2019s White House, the Epstein affair seems to generate near-bottomless interest. So the excerpt itself was well chosen.<\/p>\n

Read more How to Survive This Heat<\/a><\/p>\n

Haberman and Swan may have benefited, too, from a more open field. Because publishers have been avoiding these sorts of books, Regime Change<\/i> offers perhaps the first major comprehensively reported account of Trump\u2019s second term. The literary agent Jim Rutman is skeptical that these sales mean anything for the larger nonfiction landscape; he told me that even in a diminished market, \u201cthere was always likely to be some available space for the exceptional few.\u201d In this winner-take-all system, what publishers want, another prominent agent, Elyse Cheney, told me, is a \u201ccategory killer,\u201d which is what this title is. If readers are going to buy only one book about Trump, it should be the<\/i> book about Trump.<\/p>\n

Although these dynamics might help explain why Regime Change<\/i> broke through, they still don\u2019t answer the question of why a reading public tired of Trump decided to shell out for another book about him. To figure that out, it might help to look at the Trump administration itself. The president\u2019s popularity has hit new lows; his ability to carry out his agenda is diminished. Trump cannot extract himself from a war that almost no one seems to want or understand why he entered in the first place. Even Republicans in Congress are now pushing back against some of his most outrageously self-interested moves. And the midterm elections are nearing, which means that voters can soon take action. If Trump\u2019s critics, the people most likely to pick up this book, felt helpless against the barrage of executive orders and power grabs that marked the past 18 months, they are approaching a moment when they can do something about it. They have something to look forward to, a potential change in the status quo.<\/p>\n

This makes reading about Trump feel less like trying to focus while getting beaten up and more like thinking back on the fight the next day. A similar dynamic may have been at work in the equally blockbuster-y performance of Kamala Harris\u2019s memoir, 107 Days<\/i>, last year. Readers were ready for a postmortem of that brutal presidential campaign. And now they might be ready to think about the first year of Trump\u2019s second term\u2014about DOGE and ICE and the tariffs and Venezuela\u2014from a place of not just slight remove but relative safety, in which the power behind these wild changes is waning and a coming election might curtail it for the rest of Trump\u2019s term. Regime Change<\/i> reads like an account of the crescendo and operatic downfall of Trump; even the accumulation of details about his bathroom preferences somehow feels like a final degradation.<\/p>\n

One of the pleasures of a good book, even a nonfiction one, is the illusion of closure. You can literally close it whenever you like, even though you know that the real world and its news continues, nonstop. Trump has deprived us of the particular luxury of hindsight for more than a decade now. Every sense of an ending\u2014the Access Hollywood <\/i>tape, the first and second impeachments, the election of Joe Biden\u2014has proved to be a false one. Perhaps, as that realization settled in, books about him grew less appealing. But if hundreds of thousands of people are buying this latest one, it might be because we have reached a point where it\u2019s possible, once again, to imagine what comes next.<\/p>\n

Read more The Film Historian Who\u2019s Sick of Movies<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What the wild success of <em>Regime Change<\/em>, after a long slump in newsy nonfiction, might say about the state of the presidency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1027,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Surprising Return of the Blockbuster Trump Book - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1028\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Surprising Return of the Blockbuster Trump Book - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What the wild success of <em>Regime Change<\/em>, after a long slump in newsy nonfiction, might say about the state of the presidency.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1028\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-02T22:15:14+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1028#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1028\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"The Surprising Return of the Blockbuster Trump Book\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-02T22:15:14+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1028\"},\"wordCount\":1263,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1028#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/08e146d458c33b0e66476b9565f5fe72.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Books\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1028#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1028\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1028\",\"name\":\"The Surprising Return of the Blockbuster Trump Book - 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