Welcome back, I'm Dylan Byers.

Good evening and welcome back to In the Room, my biweekly chronicle of the vicissitudes of the American media scene. 

As many of you know, I’ve recently spent considerable time focused on the machinations within the cable news sector, particularly as CNN reorients itself in a post-Zucker, post-linear, post-Trump world. Today, however, I turn my attention to the final element of that triptych, particularly as it relates to the media entities in America’s favorite industry town.

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D.C.’s Post-Trump Media Reality-Check Rumbles On

Is there life after the 45th president? Some companies are articulating a new path; others, not so much.

Of course it was Mike Allen, the inveterate D.C. chronicler and media soothsayer, who broke the news this morning that Washington reporting power couple Peter Baker (The Times) and Susan Glasser (The New Yorker) were putting the finishing touches on a new Trump book, The Divider, out this fall. Baker and Glasser, of course, are among the most plugged-in people in town, and among those who possess the rare ability to both write for history while teasing the gossipy erogenous zones of many of the thirsty political creatures who populate the DMV. The book, Allen reported, is being touted as “an ambitious first cut at this historical moment.” But it may also be a bellwether on the salability of the Trump presidency in the more somnolent Biden era, one in which the 45th president still holds sway over his party but has proven ineffective at manipulating the anxieties of the mainstream media in his sweaty little palms. 

Last summer, bestsellers by Michael Wolff and Mike Bender suggested that the Trump phenomenon had yet to fade to embers. And certainly few reporters were more proximate to the story than Baker, in particular. Still, the precise appetite for second- and third-wave Trump books is unclear. Baker’s Times colleagues Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns have their own Trump-adjacent book ready for publication next month, followed in October by Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming tome. Are these future bestsellers hiding in plain sight, or vestiges of a multi-year book auction bonanza chasing the eye-popping success of Wolff’s Fire and Fury and Joshua Green’s Devil’s Bargain, among (many) others? An entire market is waiting to find out.

But the publication of Baker and Glasser’s book is a useful moment to reflect on how much has changed, and hasn’t, in the year-and-change since Trump left office, and D.C. media companies were left wondering what was next...

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