Spicer went on “Hannity” anyway, and Latimer and Urbahn eventually gave up on him. He hired Barnett to get him a TV contract, but the superlawyer couldn’t deliver. Using a different agent, Spicer wound up getting a publishing deal for his Trump memoir, “The Briefing” — which no one would have mistaken for a tell-all — but it did not sell well. Last month, he became a “special correspondent” on the entertainment news show “Extra.” In his debut, he quizzed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on what music he listens to.

Things went similarly sideways with Omarosa Manigault Newman, the erstwhile “Apprentice” star and former White House aide. In early 2018, Latimer and Urbahn negotiated a substantial contract for her with Hachette for a book that would offer an extremely critical take on Trump. But several weeks after an agreement was in hand, Manigault Newman, without informing Hachette, appeared on the CBS reality TV show “Celebrity Big Brother,” where she offered disparaging remarks about Trump, thereby undercutting the surprise of her book. Hachette backed out of the deal.

Represented by different agents, Manigault Newman later signed a book deal with Simon & Schuster, a CBS subsidiary. (After Sims signed his book deal, Manigault Newman sent him a brief congratulatory text: “Juicy.”) She and Spicer had failed to understand that, as Latimer told me, “the key to getting out of Trump World, in my view, is mystery.”

Of course, what makes a successful tell-all book is not just mystery but also the revelations it contains: the more alarming, the better. The specter of a ballooning deficit that counted as alarming in Stockman’s day seems quaint compared with Comey’s fears that Trump colluded with a foreign adversary and obstructed justice. Indeed, the stakes attached to the charges made in the Trump tell-alls are so high that it’s fair to ask why those charges are being delivered in a book. In the past, insiders who perceived their secrets to have these sorts of stakes, whether straight-arrow administration officials like John Dean or canny bureaucratic operators like Mark Felt or rogue whistle-blowers like Daniel Ellsberg or Edward Snowden, did not couch them (at least not at first) in bids for the best-seller lists. Would the dire warnings of Comey or his successor, Andrew McCabe — whose book, “The Threat: How the F.B.I. Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” was published in February — carry more weight if their authors weren’t receiving millions for them?

“That’s a reasonable question,” Comey conceded. “In my case, I would suggest that I offered it for free in public testimony on June 8, 2017.” That was when Comey appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee and revealed, among other things, that Trump had directed him to stop investigating former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. That was “the essence of my story,” Comey continued, “and the rest of it, I’m trying to offer broader — well beyond Trump — lessons of what we should be and can be as leaders.”

I posed the same question to Urbahn. “Books still have a cultural weight, and people treat them differently than they do op-eds and congressional testimony,” he said. “This is part of the American experience, and people have been doing them since Grant.” Ulysses S. Grant, of course, wrote his memoirs because he was dying of throat cancer and desperate, after losing all his money in a Ponzi scheme, to leave an inheritance for his wife and children. In the process, he produced one of the great autobiographies of American letters, one that is still read more than a century later. Will the same be said of any of these Trump authors?