Apparently, there’s no big market for anti-Biden books. After all, he’s not a witchy woman or a foreign Black man or a 60s era hippie. He’s just Joe, the regular white guy:
In the conservative book world, nothing is supposed to set off a gold rush like a new Democratic president. Ever since Bill Clinton inspired a wave of right-wing best sellers in the ’90s, publishing houses that cater to Republican readers have learned to make the most of a new villain in the Oval Office, churning out polemics and exposés that aim to capitalize on fear of the new president.
Unless, that is, the new president is Joe Biden.
His presidency may be young, but industry insiders have told me in recent weeks that the market for anti-Biden books is ice cold. Authors have little interest in writing them, editors have little interest in publishing them, and—though the hypothesis has yet to be tested—it’s widely assumed that readers would have little interest in buying them. In many ways, the dynamic represents a microcosm of the current political moment: Facing a new president whose relative dullness is his superpower, the American right has gone hunting for richer targets to elevate.
To some in the publishing industry, the apparent lack of appetite is bewildering. “In the past, it’s been like taking candy from a baby to write a book about the Democratic president,” one frustrated conservative editor told me, requesting anonymity to speak candidly about internal business practices. Now? “Nobody is trying.”
To others, though, the apathy makes sense. Eric Nelson, the executive editor at Broadside Books, the conservative imprint of HarperCollins, told me that the right-wing media’s portrayal of Biden as a weak, addled old man is not conducive to book-length takedowns. “Nobody who watches Fox thinks that Joe Biden is in charge of the country,” Nelson said. The popular narrative on the right is that Biden is a kind of figurehead whose White House is actually being run by radical leftists behind the scenes. “If somebody came to me and was like, ‘I have a book on Biden’s secret plan to destroy America,’ I would ask, ‘How many times does the word nap appear in the index?’” Nelson said.
Putting aside whether the perception of Biden as a bumbling geriatric bears any resemblance to reality, the fact that it’s so firmly embedded in the conservative media means that it will be difficult to dislodge. To gain literary traction on the right, a villain has to generate fear and outrage, not simply ridicule. Consider the past three decades of conservative best sellers. When Bill Clinton was on the cover, the books were laden with prurient (and in many cases dubious) details about his alleged affairs and personal corruption. When it was Barack Obama, the books portrayed him—many in barely veiled racial terms—as a dangerous radical trying to transform America. And though she was never actually elected, the ominous prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency generated years’ worth of right-wing best sellers. (In 2006, when she was still a senator considering her first presidential bid, journalist Ben Smith wrote that Clinton had already been the subject of about 30 books, with a dozen more in the works, and compared the Hillary-book boomlet to the Da Vinci Code phenomenon.)
Jonah Goldberg, a former National Review columnist who has written several popular conservative books, told me it was never hard to make Hillary Clinton seem “sinister” to readers of a certain stripe. “Hillary was a kind of Zelig figure of the post-’60s left. Some of the associations were tenuous, but you could play the political equivalent of the Kevin Bacon game with her without needing more than one or two degrees of separation. Black Panthers! Communist law firms! Sidney Blumenthal! Saul Alinsky!” Biden, an aging white guy who spent decades in the Senate, is by contrast “somewhat boringly conventional.”
But this sort of gets at the real problem:
And there’s another problem, Goldberg told me: “Most of the good ammo against Biden—which I’ve deployed in the past—isn’t as effective after four years of Trump. He says crazy things! He doesn’t know what he’s talking about! He has a ridiculous ego and lies about his brilliance and expertise! All of this is true. But all of that has been normalized by Trump.” To a conservative movement that has been “mainlining crazy for five years,” it’s hard to get excited about measured criticism of Biden and his policies.
I don’t think it’s true that Biden says crazy things, doesn’t know what he’s talking about or has a crazy ego and lies about his brilliance and expertise. That’s just Goldberg being an ass. But it is absolutely true that Trump did all those things and the contrast between him and Biden is obvious making it impossible to portray the latter as addled, narcissistic and delusional. Or an extremist. Or even old! Trump couldn’t walk down a ramp. He held his glass with two hands. He had weird verbal slips like “the oranges of the investigation” that indicated some mental misfiring. HE IS OLD TOO!
Let’s face it, Biden is boring. And that makes him a very difficult person to demonize in this crazy mediaverse we are currently trapped in. That’s a good thing.