“A Warning,” a behind-the-scenes book authored by an anonymous Trump administration official that takes a critical look at the president, has replaced Donald Trump Jr.’s “Triggered” as the No. 1 nonfiction book on The New York Times’s bestseller list.
In the latest list released by the newspaper this week, “A Warning” is the top-selling book in the publication’s “Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction” category. Trump Jr.’s book, which was released Nov. 5, now sits at No. 2 on the list amid controversy over reports of bulk purchases made of book made by the Republican National Committee.
{mosads}The success of “A Warning,” which was released Nov. 19, arrives two weeks after Hachette Book Group, which published the piece, said the book received a record number of pre-order sales.
The new book, which was authored by the same individual who wrote a bombshell New York Times op-ed last year detailing efforts of resistance within the Trump administration, is described by the Times’s list as offering “an assessment of the president and makes a moral appeal.” It remains unclear whether the author still works in the administration.
The book has already been met with opposition from allies of the president, including former White House press secretaries Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Sean Spicer, who have said the book reads as if it was written by somebody who is not close to Trump.
“It doesn’t read to me like somebody that’s spent real time with the president,” Sanders said of the book during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday.
She also pushed back against claims made in the book that officials had to slim down their briefing materials to a single key point in order to make the information easier for the president to understand.
“He takes information from a number of people, very quickly processes it, makes a decision and moves forward,” she said. “I mean, I’ve watched this process play out so many times, sat in hundreds of meetings with the president, and the idea that he can only take in one or two bullets is absurd.”
When Fox News’s Steve Hilton brought up claims during her appearance that the president “doesn’t read briefings,” Sanders exclaimed: “He reads more than anybody I know.”
“Every single foreign trip we actually would laugh about the fact he has boxes upon boxes, file boxes where he reads for hours,” she said. “The rest of us want to take a break, we want to sleep, the president works the entire time.”