This article is more than 9 months old

This article is more than 9 months old

Donald Trump Jr has not seen every event on his book tour go smoothly but he has had the eager support of the Republican party in driving sales of Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.

He has, however, lost top spot on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list to A Warning, the book by an anonymous Trump official which presents Trump Jr’s father, the president, as a menace to the republic itself.

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Tony Schwartz, the author who ghosted Donald Trump’s own bestseller The Art of the Deal and has become a stringent Trump critic, greeted the news on Twitter.

“Such poetic justice,” he wrote. “A Warning by Anonymous replaces Donald Trump Jr’s fake #1 book from atop the NYTimes bestseller list.”

The reference to Trump Jr’s “fake #1 book” was to reports such as that from the Times itself on Thursday about Republican attempts to boost sales for Triggered.

The Times said “at least nine Republican organizations, GOP candidates or advocacy groups are selling Triggered or promoting Mr Trump’s book tour, according to emails obtained … interviews and disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC)”.

Among groups identified as buying Trump Jr’s book in bulk were the National Republican Campaign Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Republican National Committee (RNC), Citizens United and Turning Point USA.

The RNC has denied making bulk purchases of the book, only for FEC records to reveal it spent nearly $100,000 on copies on 29 October. Politicians including the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, and the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz are also reported to be promoting and selling the book.

The Times published a picture of dozens of boxes of the book – under a sign reading “Capitalism Not Cronyism” – at the office of Turning Point USA, a conservative student group with which Trump Jr has close ties. The not-for-profit was the host of a Los Angeles event earlier this month which did not go according to plan after Trump Jr said he would not answer questions from the audience.

In the words of the Guardian, which first reported the story: “Donald Trump Jr ventured on to the University of California’s overwhelmingly liberal Los Angeles campus on Sunday, hoping to prove what he had just argued in his book – that a hate-filled American left was hell-bent on silencing him and anyone else who supported the Trump presidency.

“But the appearance backfired when his own supporters, diehard Make America Great Again conservatives, raised their voices most loudly in protest and ended up drowning him out barely 20 minutes into an event scheduled to last two hours.”

The Times, which has denoted bulk purchases of Triggered in its listings, conceded that “given [Trump Jr’s] prominence on the national stage and Hachette’s significant promotional campaign, the book would almost certainly have reached the best-seller lists even without bulk sales”.

A spokesman for Trump Jr told the paper Triggered “clearly would have been number one on the NYT list without the copies sold [through] the RNC and other GOP-aligned organizations”.

In his tweet, Schwartz also said it was “time for Anonymous to out him/herself”. The author’s identity has been secret for more than a year, since he or she made their print debut in a Times opinion column.

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything this week, the unnamed author wrote: “Trump will hear from me, in my own name, before the 2020 election.”

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Speculation continues. The lawyer and leading Republican Trump critic George Conway this week denied he had written A Warning with his wife, Kellyanne Conway, a senior aide to the president.

“I wish,” Conway wrote. “But no.”

Others have suggested the author may be Guy Snodgrass, an aide to former defense secretary James Mattis who like his boss has published a memoir of his own. He has also denied it.

Both books have been coolly received by the critics.

Reviewing Triggered for the Guardian, Lloyd Green wrote that Trump Jr “excoriates the left for its censoriousness, but ignores his father’s repeated demands for the same”.

A Warning, Green wrote, “fails to live up to the hype” and “offers few new revelations about the tempest-in-chief”.