What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to drum up sales for his picture book.

While Trump cabinet announcements have been coming at a regular pace over the last few weeks, Trump himself has been barely visible, other than a command performance a failed Elon Musk rocket test. He's also been relatively quiet on his private social media network: his only post today was an ad for a picture book about him.

The book, Save America, is mostly public-domain photographs, or taken from the taxpayer-funded collections of Trump's presidential "library" (though it exists only as a government website at the moment). There is almost no text. As a Washington Post review notes, the photographs are often about subjects where Trump has already tried to rewrite history. For example, it complains that "Democrats" lied about his inaugural crowd being "the biggest ever." It wasn't, but Trump made insisting otherwise the main order of business on his first day in office.

The book also insists that "pictures were almost impossible to get" of the Jan. 6th riot that tried to overturn the 2020 election on his behalf. They are not—it was one of the most heavily photographed events in human history—although none of the following pictures appear in it.

With shipping, Trump's picture book costs $110, almost double the price of the $60 Trump-branded Bible he also sells. Save America is published by Sergio Gor, who Trump just named to head the White House Personnel Office.

Why does this matter?

• There's self-promotion and then there's fleecing the rubes.

• Running a vanity publishing company doesn't qualify someone to staff a White House.

• Even when people are paying more than a hundred dollars for it, it's still wrong to lie.