Sales of Constitution topped 1 million during Trump years

At the National NEW YORK —

Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, they like to joke that what’s bad for the country is often good for the organization.

“Web traffic is through the roof,” says the nonprofit’s CEO and president, Jeffrey Rosen. “We had more than 400,000 visitors to our site in the days following Jan. 6,” when supporters of President Donald Trump rampaged in the U.S. Capitol. “Our previous record was around 160,000.”

From his extraordinary political rise in 2015-16 through the four years of his presidency, including his unprecedented challenges to his reelection loss to Joe Biden, Trump’s tenure became a kind of ongoing seminar about how the government works. Questions once limited to Constitutional scholars — how many Cabinet members are needed to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove the president from power, whether a state legislature has the power to overturn the votes of presidential balloting — became part of everyday conversation.

According to NPD BookScan, which tracks around 85% of the print market, more than 1 million copies of the Constitution in various editions have sold since Trump took office, compared to around 600,000 during the second term of President Barack Obama. The spike began in 2016 when Trump became Republican candidate for president: Sales more than doubled from the year before, from 114,000 copies to 275,000, and nearly four times higher than in Obama’s first year in office, 2009.

A chart shared by BookScan with The Associated Press shows several moments in the Trump presidency that coincided with increased sales of the Constitution: when he formally accepted the Republican nomination, in July 2016; his inauguration in January 2017; the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in September 2018; and the formal launch by the House of Representatives, in Sept. 2019, of an impeachment inquiry into Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure Ukraine’s president into investigating Biden.