How do you explain Donald Trump to small children?
Both copies of President Donald Trump were mailed to me at the office and were immediately confiscated by coworkers who wanted to know how one explained to children the overlap of Trump’s first two marriages and the bit about pussy grabbing. The answer: you don’t. Both of the President Donald Trump books just mentioned dates of marriages and divorces and included pictures of the various Trump offspring. Donald Trump avoided the issue by not mentioning Trump’s marriages or children at all.
“When I read the draft, the challenge of that book was that it was so current, there was no judgment whatsoever,” Marten remembers. “There was no perspective because he had no political life to speak of before he ran for president. All you had to go by was his business and the entertainment-type stuff and all he’d said about it. It was extremely positive. It used the language Trump uses sometimes. There was no reference to criticism of him in it. There was no political element to it. It was probably the easiest thing for the writer to do.”
Donald Trump, intended for younger children, also describes Trump’s financial problems, but in a way that a six-year-old could understand: “But then Trump was in trouble. He borrowed money from banks. He needed the money to build his businesses. But Trump could not pay the banks back. He had to give up some properties. One bank got a hotel. Another bank got his big, fancy boat.” Oh no! Not the big, fancy boat!
Marten was also a reader of presidential biographies as a child, which he says is par for the course when you grow up to get a PhD in history. He didn’t know 40 Presidents Facts & Fun, but he said he appreciated the difficulty of writing about someone who was both still alive and who hadn’t accomplished anything as president yet. He consulted on kid biographies of Michelle and Barack Obama too, and said they were also overwhelmingly positive.
