Trump bids to be publishing sales director once again
Once again former President Donald Trump is making a bid to become Simon & Schuster sales director by threatening to sue the publisher over the forthcoming publication of People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account by former New York criminal prosecutor Mark Pomerantz.
It will be the second time Trump has sued the publisher. He tried unsuccessfully to block S&S’s publication of his niece Mary Trump’s memoir Too Much and Never Enough: How my Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. That book then went on to sell more than a million copies.
Trump attorney Joe Tacopina has written to the author and publisher saying: “I strongly admonish you to take these next words seriously: If you publish such a book and continue making defamatory statements against my client, my office will aggressively pursue all legal remedies against you and your book publisher, Simon & Schuster,” Tacopina writes. “Trust me, I will zealously use every possible legal resource to punish you and your publisher for the incredible financial harm that you have caused my clients to suffer.”
Pomerantz responded: “If the former president should sue me, I will defend that litigation. I stand by the statements I have made previously, and those contained in my forthcoming book.”
Booksellers in the US look on in horrified amusement. Trump has a history of such legal action against publishers, and it has always served to boost sales of books about him that he dislikes. Most famously his lawyers sent ‘cease and desist’ letters to publisher Henry Holt and author Michael Wolff over his Fear and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Those letters only served to send the book to the top of the bestseller lists. Now it seems as if the former president is trying to do it all over again.