The defining sentence of Sarah Huckabee Sanders' chatty, formulaic and predictable little cash cow of a book comes early.
"President Trump isn't perfect [and] he isn't always easy," Sanders writes on Page 14 of "Speaking for Myself," out this week. Then she hastens to add: "But he loves the American people and is willing to fight for them even if that means fighting alone."
That suffices as her perfunctory acknowledgement that Trump can be the behavioral mess the world sees. But she offers it only with a quick pivot back to cozy adulation.
She asserts that you'd understand Trump's true nobility of purpose if only you'd seen him up close as she has.
Alas, I don't buy it. Trump's love is rather openly of himself and the people who help him love himself by loving him.
That he always supported Sanders and ever encouraged her, as she writes ... that's a personal matter bearing entirely on the two of them and not a whit on the rest of us.
She helped him love himself, going out to the media zoo and standing up for him.
Sanders is an unreconstructed political daughter and confirmed political operative. She learned resentment of liberal elitists and mean-spirited media from her mom and dad. She knows in her professional political savvy that the Trump association has propelled her toward the Arkansas governorship she probably is going to seek.
And that's her book--disdain for liberal elitists and mean-spirited media combined with devotion, whether tactical or genuine or likely a blend, to Trump.
She writes of an incident perhaps you've read about. She got the idea that Kim Jong-un had winked at her as if to mark her for assassination. Trump guffawed when she mentioned it later. He told her Kim had marked her for something else. He said she needed to "take one" for her country.
She writes that she pleaded with Trump and then-chief of staff John Kelly to stop what she seemed to consider innocent teasing. If she felt violated in any way, she certainly doesn't write that.
She relates that a woman at her kids' school called her the worst person in the world, then spat on the windshield of her car. She calls that TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome, and writes that no one ever did anything like that to express political opposition to Barack Obama.
Actually, the man she fawns over lied for years in suggesting Obama wasn't an American. That's spitting absent saliva, and it's aimed directly on the person not the windshield.
Sanders probably means that no staff members before Trump encountered the kind of palpable hatred that was directed at her. She is right about that. She got kicked out of a restaurant and life-threatened with sufficient seriousness that she got Secret Service protection.
But what she won't admit is that we've never had a press secretary required to spin for a president nearly so behaviorally inappropriate, purposely divisive and childishly abusive of detractors, which is not to justify spitting on her windshield.
This book will make Sanders money and is readable enough, following a simple formula.
She opens with an extended anecdote about being a normal woman spending time with her family and in-laws on Christmas Eve when she gets an urgent call to accompany the president on a secret surprise Christmas Day visit to troops in Iraq. The point is to show right away that she is regular, but important.
Then she tells of her background in Arkansas and happy friendships and antics at Central High School, where children from liberal families describe her in complimentary terms.
Then she tells about loading up the kids and uprooting a happy existence to venture to the madness of the nation's capital, which no one made her do.
The rest is a mixture of Trump adulation and interesting anecdotes about the remarkable things that happened to her.
Raise your hand if you've sat next to the American president and Prince Charles for dinner. (I know: Now raise your hand if you wouldn't want to.)
If you ripped every reference to Trump out of this book, you'd have about 85 pages worthy of fleshing out on the rich adventure of a smart young woman from Arkansas who can be admired if grudgingly for her competence, spunk and strength.
But you can't take Trump out of her story. He is the reason a publisher paid for it. He is the reason she probably will become governor, which is the reason she wouldn't come anywhere close to real candor about him.
This book will serve its purposes, including that it preserves a Trump rally for her in one of our state's larger arenas in 2022. He'd be a decisive power in Arkansas even as a former president.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.