Former President Donald J. Trump has tried all manner of ways to monetize his post-presidency. He has sold chocolate bars, sneakers, Bibles, NFT trading cards and even scraps of fabric from the suit he wore when his mug shot was taken last year at a jail in Atlanta. He has also been, a bit under the radar, cranking out coffee table books.
He just published his third since 2021. It is titled “Save America” and costs $99 (the autographed version is $499). It’s a tour through his time in the White House, told with photographs and captions written by Mr. Trump in a style unmistakably his own — pithy, trollish, gossipy, hyperbolic and arbitrarily capitalized. In its way, it is a revealing document, both as a piece of political propaganda and as a window into Mr. Trump’s approach to geopolitics. Much of the book concerns his relationships with various world leaders. It is a reminder, weeks before the next election, of how he conducted the nation’s affairs on the global stage.
“The Future does not belong to Globalists,” Mr. Trump declares in a caption on a photo that shows him speaking at a NATO summit in Brussels. (The one at which he hailed himself a “stable genius” and left allied leaders rattled.)
The isolationist impulses that animated his presidency are exhibited in rather catty fashion. He includes a photo of his 2019 meeting in Biarritz, France, with the leaders of the Group of 7 nations, and writes: “The World changes so much. Of these people, most of them are no longer in Government.”
Referring to Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, he writes: “Angela is no longer in charge of Germany. While people thought I didn’t get along with her, I did very much get along with her.” But then he recounts “mistakes” he says she made and includes a photo of her holding her head in her hands while he speaks to her. There is no caption.
Strict adherence to the historical record is apparently not this book’s aim. Mr. Trump writes that the mother of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada was “somehow associated” with Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator. “A lot of people say that Justin is his son,” he writes. “He says that he isn’t, but how the hell would he know!”