Not too long ago, books about Donald Trump were the safest bet in publishing. Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s tell-all about Trump’s chaotic first year in office, was a monster best seller in 2018, as were his subsequent Trump books in 2019 and 2021. Each volume of Bob Woodward’s three-part chronicle of Trump’s first term (Fear, Rage, and Peril) all reached the top of the New York Times nonfiction list. Insider accounts (such as Unhinged, by Omarosa Manigault Newman, briefly a Trump-administration official), polemics (Triggered, by Donald Trump Jr.), and other journalistic narratives captivated readers, too. All told, during his first term, at least 20 Trump-related books hit the top spot on the Times list.Now the best-seller lists tell a different story: The Trump-book bubble has burst. This is no doubt partly the result of reader fatigue—there are only so many Trump books any one politics junkie can be expected to buy. But the president himself might be personally undermining the value proposition of books about his favorite subject. During his first term, Trump books promised juicy revelations about behind-the-scenes conflict, offensive comments made in private, and crazy plans narrowly averted. This time around, Trump’s team seems united, his offensive outbursts are made in public, and the crazy plans aren’t averted. There may just be less for the chroniclers to reveal.Whatever the explanation, the numbers don’t lie. Several solidly reported and well-reviewed volumes on Trump’s interregnum and reelection, such as Meridith McGraw’s Trump in Exile and Alex Isenstadt’s Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power, didn’t even dent the hardcover-nonfiction list. Another, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, by three star politics reporters, briefly flashed onto the Times list before quickly vanishing. Even Wolff is no longer a sure thing. After three previous appearances atop the Times list, his account of the 2024 election, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, reached only No. 10 upon its debut. It fell off the list after a week and didn’t return.The once-reliable subgenre of Trump-the-conqueror volumes, designed to appeal to his base, has also lost its juice. After 10 years of Trump the politician, even readers who were once hungry to learn about the man they’d voted for seem to have had their fill. Newt Gingrich’s Trump’s Triumph lasted only two weeks on the nonfiction chart in June. Despite cable-news attention, The Greatest Comeback Ever, by the Fox News commentator Joe Concha, was a one-week wonder in May. So was the CNN pundit Scott Jennings’s A Revolution of Common Sense, published in November. Eric Trump’s Under Siege: My Family’s Fight to Save Our Nation landed in the top spot in November, but lasted only three weeks on the list. The one certifiable hit has been Melania Trump’s eponymous memoir.“Coming out cold with a Trump book right now would probably be a tougher sell than it was five years ago,” the ABC News journalist Jonathan Karl told me. “The world is not obsessing about Trump’s actions today the way they were during his first term. Many people have tuned out.” Karl is the author of several best-selling books about the Trump epoch. Despite well-attended promotional appearances, however, his most recent volume—Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America—lasted only a week on the Times nonfiction list in November.The hot topic in political publishing over the past year seems to have been Trump’s 2024 opponents, not Trump—perhaps because readers were more interested in understanding how the Democrats botched things so badly. Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s account of Joe Biden’s physical and cognitive decline, was a best seller for much of the summer. Kamala Harris’s memoir about the 2024 election, 107 Days, is still on the chart after three months. No recent book about Trump has approached those numbers.[Kamala Harris: The constant battle]“These are some really terrific books with important reporting in them, but it just seems like the public is exhausted at the moment,” the New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker told me. “They’re inundated with Trump at every hour of the day, and they may want to use their personal reading time for something more escapist.” Baker and his wife, the New Yorker columnist Susan Glasser, co-wrote The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017–2021, a top-selling title in 2022.I have had my own encounter with the shifting economics of Trump-focused nonfiction. A proposal I wrote for a Trump-centric book last year was met with utter indifference. One editor responded to my agent with kind words for my pitch, but explained: “We’ve been struggling with books on Trump. I think readers have hit a wall with the relentless coverage of him and his policies. We’re not seeing book sales on this subject so I’m going to pass.”That’s not to say there won’t be more to come. Baker, for one, thinks the current lull is temporary. Ultimately, he said, “Trump is such a consequential figure for our society that there’s still a lot of room for future books that capture his role in history.” Indeed, two of Baker’s Times colleagues, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, are at work on a book focusing on the first year of Trump’s second term. The thing about Trump is that he’s always “too much and never enough,” to quote the title of Mary Trump’s 2020 book about her uncle. It sold more than a million copies.