At a rally in September, Donald Trump took a break from talking about Arnold Palmer’s penis and telling various racial and religious groups to get their heads “examined” to plug his wife’s forthcoming memoir. “Go out and get her book,” he said. “She just wrote a book. I hope she said good things about…I don’t know, I didn’t…so busy.” With that ringing endorsement, Melania Trump’s book debuted last week at the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. (The former president did acknowledge this, saying, “That’s not an easy thing to do, especially when your name is Trump.”)
The methodology behind the New York Times best-seller list is notoriously secretive, but according to Circana BookScan, Melania closed out its first-week sales with 85,349 hardcover copies. So what do the numbers mean? Fellow former first lady Michelle Obama’s 2018 memoir, Becoming, debuted at number one, selling 636,696 copies.
Melania, who describes The New York Times as a member of the “cancel mob” in her memoir, promptly posted a graphic on X announcing the book’s status, complete with the paper’s signature font. She joins a lineage of conservative personalities who love to trash the paper but are unable to contain their excitement over making the list. When Donald Trump Jr.’s book took the top spot in 2019, he tweeted an Axios report about it. Political commentator Dave Rubin, who published an interview on YouTube titled “Debunking the Great Book-Banning Lie,” supporting the thesis that allowing parents to ban books is good, actually, celebrated his spot on the charts by posting a video in which he burns his own book.
What sets Melania apart is that the New York Times didn’t mark it with the conspicuous bulk-buy symbol known as the dagger that so often marks Trumpworld books. According to The Times, Trump Jr.’s book found its way to the top with the aid of a nearly $100,000 bulk purchase of copies by the Republican National Convention, when it offered the book as a campaign-donation perk. (Recent books that have appeared on the list with the help of bulk buys include Trey Yingst’s Black Saturday and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Truths.) The Trump campaign doesn’t appear to be hawking Melania via donation emails, either, which is a departure from the norm. According to a search in the Archive of Political Emails, when Jared Kushner published his memoir in 2022, he and Ivanka Trump sent more than 80 messages combined through Trump campaign emails (sample subject lines: “I wrote a book,” “I signed my book,” “My husband signed his new book,” and “I want you to have it”) soliciting donations in exchange for copies. Melania Trump advertised her book with just three preorder emails, in July, August, and one on September 11.
Now that it’s out, who, exactly, is reading Melania? Not necessarily the people included in her five promotional blurbs on Amazon, which hardly engage with the former first lady’s text—in fact, none of them have anything to do with the text. In keeping with much of the book’s content, they instead pull from old press remarks and speeches. (Incidentally, Melania includes an anecdote about that copycat RNC speech, writing that while Michelle Obama’s words “resonated deeply” with her, the plagiarism wasn’t her fault.) Kellyanne Conway’s quote, pulled from this year’s RNC speech, calls her “extraordinary, elegant, beautiful, brilliant.” Nikki Haley’s depicts her as “an intelligent, beautiful, patriotic treasure”; Brigitte Macron says she is “charming, intelligent, and very open”; and Dana Perino promises that “she lights up the room.” Donald Trump’s leads the pack, and begins, “Melania is my rock.”
While LitHub’s review aggregator, BookMarks, lists seven reviews for Melania (mine for VF’s among them) and six other pans, the book is faring better with buyers than critics. On Goodreads, its nearly 800 ratings are hovering at an average of 4.01, and on Amazon, the 1,200 and counting ratings have hit a 4.5 average. As is often the case with a memoir, fans of the book are fans, first, of the writer: Readers like that she is beautiful, that she loves her son, that it has photographs “of her life,” and that she refers to Donald Trump as “my husband.”
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