MILWAUKEE — They swear they’re not trolling.
Two men have a booth set up at the Republican National Convention selling a 300-page hardcover, green-bound book featuring former President Trump’s tweets — or “the great work, the collected poems of Donald J. Trump” as they call it.
Each page features a singular post from the social platform now called X. For example, page 270 features one of Trump’s “most-minimal works”: the word “we.”
The book divides the posts into sections including, “loathing,” “introspective musings” “big, bigger, biggest,” “like a dog” and “free verse.” Free verse “leaves the confounds of the English language behind and soars to new heights.”
The coffee-table books are selling like hot cakes. They brought hundreds of copies and say they have completely sold out.
One of the sellers, wearing a “Covfefe” T-shirt, explained to a convention-goer how the term “covfefe” was very poetic. Covfefe is a word that was likely a typo Trump made in 2017 and went viral. The woman then asked if he was trolling her.
“Are you a Democrat?” she asked.
He promised he wasn’t. She then told him she wouldn’t buy it — or anything from a Democrat. Once again, he promised her he was not a Democrat. She then bought multiple copies.
The two sellers, Gregory Woodman and Ian Pratt, told The Hill this book is Volume 1 from “his early years” of 2009 to 2019, and is sold for $45 in honor of Trump’s place in history. However, Volume 2 will be sold for $47 and will feature the “the impeachments, the indictments, the incitement, the global pandemic …”
“Although if [Vice President] Kamala [Harris] steps in at the last minute, we might bump it up to $48.”
Woodman and Pratt said they plan to donate some of the proceeds to the families of the victims of the shooting at a Trump rally in Butler, Pa.
When asked again whether they were trolling, Woodman smiled and insisted he was not. After some back-and-forth, he said doesn’t know whether he’ll vote for Trump in November.
He only knows Trump as a poet. “Is he running for something?”