The conservative book world doesn't know what to do with Biden

To others, though, the apathy makes sense. Eric Nelson, the executive editor at Broadside Books, the conservative imprint of HarperCollins, told me that the right-wing media’s portrayal of Biden as a weak, addled old man is not conducive to book-length takedowns. “Nobody who watches Fox thinks that Joe Biden is in charge of the country,” Nelson said. The popular narrative on the right is that Biden is a kind of figurehead whose White House is actually being run by radical leftists behind the scenes. “If somebody came to me and was like, ‘I have a book on Biden’s secret plan to destroy America,’ I would ask, ‘How many times does the word nap appear in the index?’” Nelson said. Ben Shapiro, the popular right-wing podcast host and author, echoed this sentiment. The president “has a deeply nonthreatening persona,” Shapiro told me. “You kind of feel bad attacking him, honestly, because it feels like elder abuse.” Putting aside whether the perception of Biden as a bumbling geriatric bears any resemblance to reality, the fact that it’s so firmly embedded in the conservative media means that it will be difficult to dislodge. To gain literary traction on the right, a villain has to generate fear and outrage, not simply ridicule. Consider the past three decades of conservative best sellers. When Bill Clinton was on the cover, the books were laden with prurient (and in many cases dubious) details about his alleged affairs and personal corruption. When it was Barack Obama, the books portrayed him—many in barely veiled racial terms—as a dangerous radical trying to transform America. And though she was never actually elected, the ominous prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency generated years’ worth of right-wing best sellers. (In 2006, when she was still a senator considering her first presidential bid, journalist Ben Smith wrote that Clinton had already been the subject of about 30 books, with a dozen more in the works, and compared the Hillary-book boomlet to the Da Vinci Code phenomenon.)
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