Reflecting on the glory of his new photobook, Donald Trump writes, “No other book compares to Save America ,” which is an extraordinary claim from a man who just a few months ago was hawking copies of the Bible. But Save America is, indeed, a singular production – literally a steal at $US99 (plus $US11 for shipping). Many of the hundreds of photos were drawn from the Donald J.
Trump Presidential Library, a federally funded oxymoron. Trump’s coffee table book features the iconic assassination attempt photo on the cover. Credit: Getty Images Part retrospection, part revenge, part fantasy, Save America was released last week by Winning Team, a right-wing publishing house founded by Sergio Gor and Donald Trump Jr to promote books by Trump and other literary luminaries such as Kari Lake and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Arriving just two months before the presidential election, Save America would seem well-positioned to serve as a visual campaign biography. But rather than argue for returning Trump to the White House, the book’s captions – written in Trump’s enthusiastic style of capitalisation, like a fascist Emily Dickinson – suggest that he never really left. Indeed, this is a volume too pure to be sullied by campaign details.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are barely mentioned. I spotted JD Vance only once and without identification or comment. Hannibal Lecter gets more ink.
Oh yes, there are passing mentions of a strong military; the need to stop illegal immigration, which is “WRONG”; the importance of domestic manufacturing; and a fanciful reference to America’s oil and gas lasting into the future for “HUNDREDS OF YEARS.” But the overwhelming visual evidence of the book implies that what will really save America is Donald Trump in a blue suit. Loading Over more than 350 lavish pages, Trump presents a breathless gallery of himself during and after his reign as the 45th president.
There are many, many smiling images of Trump; there are Dirty Harry images of Trump; there are photos of Trump surrounded by adoring fans, conferring with heads of state and gazing over fields of worshipful supporters; and there are innumerable shots of Trump making a fist. Although the accrual of these images is offered as a chronology of success, their numbing redundancy serves as a kind of repudiation of time: Trump as the beginning and the end, the first and the last, alpha male and omega male. He claims that Save America “is a MUST HAVE on U.
S. History,” but the tone is so onanist that the book should really be left alone to enjoy itself in private. Unfortunately, the potential historical value of these stock photos is thwarted by Trump’s stingy commentary.
For some reason, the man who won’t stop nattering on at campaign events becomes downright laconic in these pages. Even images of the assassination attempt – showing him smeared with blood, raising his fist – inspire nothing more than a few pat sentences. Trump’s reticence is matched by the book designers, who inexplicably decided to strip away any identifying information and context from these photos.
(There’s no table of contents, no index – every expense was spared.) And so, we gaze upon Trump at a factory, at a rally, in a hangar, on a field, in a meeting. Where? When? Why? Who cares?! This is Where’s Waldo? for the MAGA fanatic.
Context and meaning are irrelevant. Page after glossy page, the people around Trump – the extras – change, but Trump remains as iconic and dependable as a bottle of Coca-Cola. As always with the Very Stable Genius’s photo books – this is his third – the selection and order speak volumes.
The effectiveness of our legal system to hold Trump responsible is demonstrated by the photo he’s chosen as the prefatory image: his brooding mug shot at the Fulton County Jail after he was indicted in August of last year on racketeering charges in Georgia. It’s one of the few photos here that gets the signature Sharpie treatment, with the words “Never give up / Never surrender” scrawled over his golden hair. Former president Donald Trump’s mug shot.
Then the story begins in earnest, dragging us back to Trump’s central obsession and his administration’s initial “alternative fact.” Under a photo of the 2017 inauguration, he writes, “Democrats tried to disparage Crowd size, knowing that this was the Largest Inaugural Crowd EVER - See for yourself!” A hundred pages in, Trump returns to that theme, claiming that he drew a bigger crowd than Martin Luther King Jr. “But I don’t care,” he says magnanimously, “because I love Martin Luther King!” Even the book’s brief nod to January 6, 2021, is obsessed with crowd size rather than, say, accusations of incitement, treason, conspiracy and insurrection.
“THIS IS THE REAL JANUARY 6TH,” Trump writes under a photo carefully selected to avoid showing Confederate flags, nooses, and thugs beating up police officers and smashing their way into the Capitol. “Pictures were almost impossible to get,” he says about the most photographed event in modern history. “They never captured the size of the Crowd – Nobody wanted to speak about it.
” So unfair. You try to violently overturn just one presidential election, and nobody is willing to give you credit for the crowd size. There probably aren’t more than a few hundred words total in this shiny work of propaganda, but if Save America could be said to have a plot, it’s the epic struggle between Trump’s desire to exalt himself and his instinct to denigrate his enemies.
This dark impulse is so randomly exposed that it feels all the more thrilling when it pops out like a switchblade. In a sense, Save America serves as a graphic demonstration that Trump’s ability to calibrate the appropriate treatment of friends and foes is totally haywire. For instance, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, appears here shaking Trump’s hand.
Trump assures us that he “got along well” with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He calls Hungary’s autocratic Viktor Orbán “one of the Great Leaders of the World.” And North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, who periodically threatens to lob nuclear weapons at the United States, appears in an astonishing spread of 10 adoring pages that look as if they were designed by a high school yearbook staff in Pyongyang.
But woe unto Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Right after a happy photo in the White House, Trump erupts with an unprecedented threat aimed at the actual billionaire: “Mark Zuckerberg would come to the Oval Office to see me,” Trump writes. “He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.
” Like everything in Save America , there is no explanation provided with this rant, which continues: “He told me that there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me. We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison – as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.
” Donald Trump as he was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. Credit: AP The prize for weirdest caption, though, must go to Trump’s remarks about Justin Trudeau. One of the longest bits of sustained commentary in the book, it’s a prose poem of Trumpian lunacy: “His mother was beautiful and wild,” he writes about the Canadian prime minister.
“In the 1970s, she would go ‘clubbing’ with the Rolling Stones, but she was also somehow associated with Fidel Castro. She said he was ‘the sexiest man I’ve ever met,’ and a lot of people say that Justin is his son. He swears that he isn’t, but how the hell would he know! Castro had good hair, the ‘father’ didn’t, Justin has good hair, and has become a communist just like Castro.
” Any suspicion that Trump didn’t write this book himself should be allayed by the presence of such glorious gibberish. If there were more unhinged ramblings like this in Save America , it’d be a whole lot more fun. It’s been said before: Let Trump be Trump.
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