Another month, another book about the Trump White House.
The latest, due to be published in late January, was written by Cliff Sims, who served as a special assistant to the president and director of White House message strategy.
The book is called Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House and is reportedly based on hundreds of pages of notes that Sims took in real time of his experiences in the White House. Sims reportedly received a seven-figure advance for the book, which will be published by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
During his tenure in the Trump administration, Sims was largely seen as a Trump loyalist, who was even responsible for helping Trump develop his enemies list, according to an advance copy of a news release obtained by Axios. He left the White House in May.
Team of Vipers is reportedly modeled on All Too Human, the tell-all memoir George Stephanopoulos wrote following his time serving as communications director under President Clinton. Politicoreports that the book will be neither a takedown, like Omarosa Manigault Newman’s, nor will it be a positive, Trump-approved account, à la Sean Spicer’s book.
“I suspect that posterity will look back on this bizarre time in history like we were living on the pages of a Dickens novel,” Sims writes in the author’s note. “Lincoln famously had his Team of Rivals. Trump had his Team of Vipers. We served. We fought. We brought our egos. We brought our personal agendas and vendettas. We were ruthless. And some of us, I assume, were good people.”