As his successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was being kicked out of a restaurant in Virginia, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer was getting ready to throw himself a party. For months, the career D.C. flack had been working to rehabilitate his image after being jettisoned from the West Wing last summer. He’s co-hosting a podcast with Townhall.com’s Katie Pavlich. He landed a gig with a paid speaking firm. And he has been working on a pilot for a somewhat jejune talk show called Common Ground, in which he would sit down with people across the political spectrum for a friendly chat over coffee or a pint. For the most part, Spicer has been lucky enough to avoid the worst fallout from the Trump administration, leaving before the Charlottesville catastrophe, and surviving an awkward Emmys appearance with only minor tut-tutting from the left. But as he preps for the release this week of his new book, The Briefing, which promises readers an insider’s perspective on working for the most unusual president in American history, Spicer is struggling to attain the commercial success and political relevancy of his peers.

Fox News, the most obvious home for a former Trump staffer, did not offer Spicer a contract as a commentator. He’s reportedly having trouble booking guests for his talk show, which has yet to find a buyer. Worse, Spicer’s book is failing to generate the kind of pre-sale excitement that would be expected of a post–White House tell-all in the Trump era. A glowing endorsement from Trump—“Really good, go get it”—immediately marked the book as unlikely to contain the salacious fly-on-the-wall details that helped Michael Wolff sell millions of copies. Nor does Spicer have the feverish pro-Trump bona fides that have made Jeanine Pirro’s new magnum opus—Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy—the top-seller on Amazon. (As of Monday, The Briefing was ranked number 289, which is still pretty respectable.) According to a friend of Spicer’s, the release party for the book isn’t expected to be much of a draw, either: tickets for press, which were initially $30 a pop, are now free. Spicer fans and colleagues, meanwhile, are being charged $250-plus for admission. “When I saw the party I thought maybe I’d stop by,” Spicer’s friend told me. “But then I looked and went, ‘Wait, I’ve got to buy a ticket? That seems sort of cheesy.’”

Spicer’s long history in Washington and his early exit from the White House have taken the edge off what might otherwise be a career-defining miscalculation in working for Trump. “Sean is not a Trumper who has no other credentials,” Matt Mackowiak, C.E.O. of the Potomac Strategy Group and a longtime Republican comms specialist in the Spicer orbit, told me. “He has a pretty large network. Obviously his career has been defined [by Trump], but that’ s the risk you take when you take that job.” Nevertheless, he added, “I think he probably thought re-entry was going to be easier than it’s been.”

Those searching for post-Trump success tend to fall into one of two extremes: either they carefully distance themselves from the president’s rabid nativism, maintaining a reputation as a voice of beleaguered sanity and sliding relatively seamlessly back into the real world, or they lean into the partisan bloodletting, turning the art of publicly defending Trump into a full-time gig. People like Dina Powell, who left the White House on her own terms to rejoin Goldman Sachs, and Gary Cohn, who still has pull on Wall Street, fall into the former group. In the latter, we find people like Michael Anton, the former National Security Council spokesperson who’s now writing anti-migrant screeds as a fellow at Hillsdale College, and Steve Bannon, who is busy promoting Trumpism abroad.