If you don’t want people to read, say, a book about you, because it might give away how you sold out the country in pursuit of trying to avoid being thrown in the clink, maybe don’t bring attention to said book.
“Here we go again! Another Fake book is out, this one, supposedly very boring and stale, by self appointed head case, Failing (unfunded liability!) New York Times writer, Maggie Hagerman.”
This was the beginning of a rant in the form of a post from Donald Trump to his soon-to-be defunct Truth Social this morning, misspelling the name of NYT reporter Maggie Haberman, but otherwise giving her free publicity for her book, Confidence Man, The Making of Donald Trump and Breaking of America, which I’m linking to because, why not?
It’s called the Streisand Effect, a term that dates back to Barbra Streisand suing to remove a photo from a publicly-available collection of coastline photographs depicting coastal erosion in which her mansion was visible.
She lost the case, had to pay the photographers legal fees, and the site with the photo collection was viewed 420,000 times in the month following the suit being made public.
Prior to the suit, the photo of Streisand’s mansion had been downloaded a total of six times, two of those being from her attorneys.
Basically, if you don’t want people to pay attention to something, don’t get them to pay attention to it.
In the case of Haberman’s book, I’ve heard a lot about it, and was on the fence about whether I wanted to buy it, because it could be just another in the long line of behind-the-scenes tell-all Trump books.
But if Trump doesn’t want me to read it, maybe …