Telling Trump’s story to kids gets tricky for publishers
With parents debating veracity of basic facts, books present challenges
On Nov. 10, Beth Sutinis sat at her desk in Brooklyn, N.Y., with a big task looming. As the executive editor for the children’s division of Time Inc. Books, she and her colleagues had worked through the fall to update their book Presidents of the United States. They added a spread about Barack Obama, another about the 2016 election and a third about Hillary Clinton, who polls had indicated would be elected the 45th president.
In the days after the election, Sutinis scrambled to produce a profile of the person who was elected instead. “It was one of the harder things I have had to do in a long career of writing and editing nonfiction for kids,” she said.
Presidential biographies are a staple of children’s book publishing, and of classrooms across the country. Nonfiction for children is a surging category, particularly in light of a Common Core mandate that schools put greater emphasis on it in their curriculum. Publishers like Penguin Young Readers, Scholastic and Time for Kids chronicle stories like the rise of Obama from Illinois state senator to president, or the political legacy of the Bush family, interspersing those accounts with facts about presidential history. The books hit bookshelves every four years, usually long before historians and writers of nonfiction for adults weigh in.
But the story of Donald Trump posed a unique set of challenges.
After an election cycle whose divisive effect on voters is still being felt, publishing books for classroom use has been unusually perilous. For Sutinis, the difficulty went beyond the time crunch to finding concise quotations from Trump’s campaign appearances that didn’t include contentious remarks.
Sutinis’ updated edition outlines Trump’s business and television career and his campaign. “He made controversial remarks about several groups of people, including Latinos, Muslims, African-Americans and women,” the book reads. “This led many, including some Republican officials, to back away from him.”
It goes on: “But Trump continued to receive wide support and thousands of people attended his rallies.”
One page features a “Did You Know?” fact: “Donald Trump is the first person elected to the presidency without experience in either the government or the military.”
A number of publishers have already released books about Trump, including Rookie Biographies: President Donald Trump, from Scholastic, and Donald Trump: Outspoken Personality and President, from Lerner Publications. The president and his relatives will also be the subject of future books for young readers. Lerner, for instance, announced that it would publish Ivanka Trump: A Brand of Her Own this fall. But publishers and editors of children’s books are unaccustomed to weighing issues of partisan division and biased reporting, said Daniel Kraus, the books for youth editor at Booklist magazine in Chicago. Now, adults of different political persuasions are debating the veracity of basic facts. “Publishers are a little nervous about that,” Kraus said. “Parents can say, ‘This is not the reality I believe.’ It’s a reflection of where we are as a nation right now.”
For a children’s audience, the mandate is to provide unbiased facts with a dusting of the context required to maintain accuracy, said Joanne Mattern, a freelance writer of children’s nonfiction with 250 titles on her résumé.
Mattern has written about Trump in two biographies for children and in an update of The New Big Book of U.S. Presidents, from Running Press Kids, which begins, “Donald Trump was the most unlikely of presidential candidates.”
Running Press gave Mattern discretion to include relevant topics about Trump’s influence. She included The Apprentice, and “Trump and the Muslim Community,” writing that he had called for a temporary “shutdown” on Muslims entering the United States.
“This is a big part of Trump’s policies and a big reason he was elected,” Mattern said. “You couldn’t leave it out.”
The entire country is focused on Trump right now, but he is not the only president with a complicated past, said Sutinis of Time Inc. When she was reviewing all the entries of Presidents of the United States, she noted that the previous edition reported that Thomas Jefferson had grown up in a wealthy family on a plantation. For the new edition, she inserted a paragraph about Jefferson, the slave owner.
The earlier edition had been published in 2006. “Even in the last 10 years, we have become more honest in how we deal with difficult history,” she said, adding that children today are also far more sophisticated and aware of the news.
Not only do they have access to news online, she said, but they also “have access to us, their parents, and they are with us when we are reading news articles on our phones. We are all consuming news during family time, and we are discussing news in those family settings. They are more exposed to news, and they’re asking more questions.”