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Maybe Donald Trump was onto something with those nondisclosure agreements. It only took two of his harshest critics to prove him right, apparently because of a bank hit.

When Trump first ran for president in 2015 and 2016, he required many of his aides to sign NDAs to prevent them from telling stories about the campaign. A federal judge has since ruled that at least one was too broad and vague, freeing the former employee, and likely others, from the muzzle. Similarly, the Justice Department dropped its case against a former adviser to Melania Trump over a book that Trump’s team believed also violated its NDA.

The ploy was not irrational. Trump, in business, in politics and in power, wanted to prevent unflattering facts from leaking out. Against the advice of lawyers, he deployed similar NDAs against White House staff, seeking to protect his own image and ego, though it remains unclear how widely those tools were used or whether they can be enforced.

Well, looking at the nascent bestseller lists right now, two political arsonists prove that former presidents involved in coups aren’t the only ones who might want to seek silence from their advisers. Self-styled former Republican hitman Tim Miller and Democratic consultant Lis Smith have released transparently scandalous memoirs in recent days. Miller’s Why We Did It and Smith’s Any Given Tuesday may simply rewrite the template of what a political memoir can be and issue a warning to any future candidate that their biggest risk may be opening the door to those already on the ballot. payroll.

(Disclosure: I am friendly with both of them. I have attended their birthday parties and am by no means neutral in my admiration for each. Our social circles overlap in very important ways and politics have a way of conflating friendships and source depending on the electoral cycle and mutual need for access).

Most of these books are sleepy, and so sleepy by design. Aaron Sorkin struck the perfect sarcasm when he observed in a 2002 West Wing script that the sitting president would read his challenger’s latest book as soon as its supposed author had. Real-life presidential candidates publish their own tomes as predicates of their races, offering focus group pablum that advisers hope will build a backbone of justification for a race. They often seem funny; For example, the only thing I remember from Vice President Kamala Harris’s The Truths We Hold is the awkward moment she had explaining to the world how to say her name.

But Miller and Smith reset that expectation. Miller is a Republican party man, a campaign volunteer as a teenager before becoming a top spokesman for the Republican National Committee and some of his avatars like Jeb Bush and Jon Huntsman. And Smith’s pedigree is no less marked, having been on the line running for the Democratic Governors Association, Obama’s re-election and dozens of other competitive races before establishing himself as the svengali of Pete Buttigieg’s Cinderella presidential campaign.

But his charming resumes betray a roughness in his texts. Miller is open about his troubled history with the game. Smith is transparent about her time dating former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and how she lost her job as Bill DeBlasio’s primary spokeswoman due to the outrageous coverage. But where others would find euphemisms to disguise those episodes, both lean on them; Miller unblinkingly admits her missteps, and Smith jokes that she and DeBlasio both wanted to sleep with Spitzer, but only one made it.

Once accredited as players in their games, each one fed on the access drug. The books as a whole are both a rule book on how to run (and not run) campaigns, and a warning on how not to justify dubious decisions. A continuous thread of regret runs through both books, and candidates would do well to understand the personal toll their choices can take on aid. While politicians must focus on their singular goal of winning, the ripple effect hits the staff in ways that often last much longer than the FEC quarter.

An unwritten rule of politics is that the staff never becomes the story. Sure, The War Room made minor celebrities out of Bill Clinton’s campaign. But that was a rare exception. Typically, campaign staffers deflect any personal interest in their duties, hoping instead to focus on the candidate. If a reporter writes about the staff, the campaign is most likely in trouble. Smith, who entered politics after being inspired by The War Room, and Miller turn that theory on its head. Smith had no qualms about giving the documentary crew access to the inner sanctum of the Buttigieg campaign for his own War Room-style documentary, and Miller has fewer secrets than most in his own media identity. His books only support his starkly honest account of his stories.

As a matter of self-promotion, the books would not be notable. Both Miller and Smith appear as quasi-heroes, semi-wise men, pseudo-sociologists. But more broadly, they are diagnosing the ills of the party that paid for their house for years. Miller is dimly aware of the sins of the Republican Party, a party she helped even as it sought to deny her the right to marry her husband. And Smith is no less circumspect as she looks around her Democratic Party to find a mess of ideology and identity that purports to celebrate women’s rights while shaming one of its most talented communicators. That doesn’t make their diagnoses any easier to digest, especially for the establishment wings of their respective parties.

Books alone probably won’t remake the publishing industry. In fact, they probably shouldn’t. It would be a mistake for the vast majority of campaign workers to think that they should keep a diary in the hope of following these exemplary works in any airport bookstore. But both Miller and Smith make important contributions to the field of campaign travelogues. They will also rightly inspire a lot of paranoia among the next cohort of candidates. Miller claims he’s out of The Game, but I find it hard to believe his departure is permanent; he’s too good at the Dark Arts to be left out. Smith rightly points out that his book probably makes it more difficult for him to land the next job, but he also says he probably wouldn’t want to work for a candidate who became apprehensive knowing his conduct could face similar scrutiny. If only there was an NDA to stop such disclosures…

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Write to Philip Elliott at philip.elliott@time.com.

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