Former President Clinton says that as the latest thriller he co-authored with James Patterson was being published, he wondered whether the Trump administration would try to come up with a reason “to ban it.”
“I was actually trying to think if there was some reason they could think of to ban it,” the ex-commander in chief said during a Tuesday interview alongside Patterson on “The Daily Show.”
Clinton’s comment came in response to a question from host Jordan Klepper on if he knew when the book, “The First Gentleman,” was “going to be banned by the Trump administration.”
“It wouldn’t be the White House, but in certain counties, they may all of a sudden,” best-selling scribe Patterson, a vocal critic of book bans, told Klepper.
“They don’t need a reason,” Patterson, 78, added.
“One person goes in [and says] ‘I don’t like the book.’ And, ‘OK, we’ll ban it,’” he said. “So it’ll probably be banned in a couple of counties.”
Patterson was one of nearly two dozen authors who donated millions to the free expression organization PEN America in 2023 to push back against book banning efforts. A year earlier, more than 1,500 individual titles were removed from K-12 schools across the country, according to PEN America.
“I don’t like it. It’s a bad deal,” Clinton, 78, said of book bans.
“Maya Angelou, who read the inaugural poem at my first inauguration — wrote it, and read it and was a great human being — the first thing the White House did was to ban her book, ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,’” Clinton recalled.
Angelou’s 1969 autobiography was reportedly one of nearly 400 books that was pulled from the U.S. Naval Academy library in April as part of an effort to remove titles containing diversity, equity and inclusion content.
Calling it a “magnificent book,” Clinton reflected on Angelou’s personal story about a child who “loses the ability to speak for a couple of years because she was abused, and then she blooms.”
“I couldn’t figure out why that was a problem,” Clinton said.
“I don’t like book banning,” the 42nd president added.
“I wasn’t ever for banning books that were full of things they said about me that weren’t true,” Clinton said.
“It never occurred to me that I should stop you from reading them.”
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