Don Jr. is many things—a hunter, a lover of big fish, a failson, and now… a New York Times best-selling author. Triggered, his useless paean to uselessness, has wiggled its way to the top of the much-vaunted Times bestseller list, but there’s a big ole caveat—according to the Times, a lot of the book’s sales were from bulk orders, which indicates that “the author or someone associated with the author bought a substantial number of copies.”
Color me extremely shocked that a man from an extremely scam-happy, corrupt family is in all likelihood gaming an easily gamed system! As Electric Literature wrote in 2018, the Times is well aware that authors often find ways to juice their sales, and in particular, authors of books with a more conservative bent. And a book that’s made it to the Times list largely through bulk sales is marked with a dagger, what one book industry source told Page Six is called the “the deadly dagger” and a “rare penalty that is only called for flagrant fouls.”
“These daggers are important to watch,” Erin Barnett wrote in Electric Literature, “because they indicate that someone is paying a lot of money to make sure books such as The Empire State by the political commentator Jerome R. Corsi (a book on the secret conspiracy to undermine the Trump presidency) get on the list, regardless of how many people actually read them.” And now, Triggered!
Despite the dagger next to his name, this hasn’t stopped Don Jr. from bragging about his (inflated) book sales.
As for who exactly was zooming around scooping up large quantities of Triggered, the Associated Press’s Zeke Miller pointed out that the Republican National Committee offered autographed copies of Triggered as a “reward” for donations, a practice that he wrote “helps boost reported sales.”
Steve Guest, a spokesperson for the RNC, told the Times that they did not buy a “large bulk purchase,” but that copies of Triggered were bought “to keep up with demand.” However they bought the books, it’s clear that the RNC spent a lot of money to buy Don Jr.’s book.
Congrats to Don Jr. You’ve made it, once again, all on your own!