In early 2021, I paid a visit to my local secondhand bookstore. Though I go there regularly to browse and pick up new books, this time the goal was actually to lighten my shelves. Because I always buy more than I can possibly read and because publishers send me more than I can possibly review, an annual clean-out is usually in order — and on this occasion the situation was especially dire. Between 2016 and 2020, books about Donald Trump had seemed to pile up faster than I could get rid of them. A few, usually those with original reporting, proved quite insightful, but many didn’t have much to say that was remotely new. Plenty were screamingly mediocre, and some were so transparently exercises in grift you almost had to admire the chutzpah of their authors.

Regardless of merit or novelty, however, the general rule with Trump-related books is that they tended to sell in absurdly large numbers. David Frum’s Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, published in 2018, immediately shot to number one in Amazon’s “Fascism” category and was soon sent back to the printers for a second run, while David Cay Johnston’s It’s Even Worse Than You Think became the website’s bestselling title in “Political Conservatism and Liberalism.” Shattered, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s 2017 account of Hillary Clinton’s doomed presidential campaign, sold more than 125,000 copies and made the New York Times bestseller list. Books like Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s A Very Stable Genius, and Bob Woodward’s Fear all sold upward of fifty thousand copies.

As I discovered when I tried to offload my own collection, Trump books had proliferated so much by the beginning of Joe Biden’s term that staff at many secondhand bookstores had been ordered by management to stop taking them. (In the early 1980s, Atari reportedly set up a mass burial site in New Mexico for hundreds of thousands of unwanted gaming cartridges. Today, one imagines, there presumably exists a similar graveyard somewhere for books with titles like The Covfefe Chronicles and Liar-in-Chief.)