In a house on a cul-de-sac in Arlington Heights, a nondescript suburb of modest 1950s homes north-west of Chicago, Deborah Fossett is counting hundred-dollar bills. Holding each one up to the light, she examines nine in total. Satisfied, she writes out a receipt, and hands it to the customer, who picks up his purchase—an antique set of silver Tiffany cutlery. Similar sets online sell for thousands of dollars, she tells him. But this one is missing several pieces, and in any case, everything in the house must go, and it is past two o’clock, so $900 is enough. He eyes his bargain again and quickly leaves.

Donald Trump’s criminal trial, soon to enter its fifth week, has felt like drawn-out foreplay. There have been moments of frisson. But as with any such encounter that stretches on and on, arousal waxes and wanes, prompting a few fateful questions. Where is this going? Hurry it up already? Ultimately, climax in this trial will depend on the testimony of one man: Michael Cohen, Mr Trump’s former lawyer. And he is not due on the witness stand for several days yet.

The campaign memoir is an American tradition with a few signature ingredients. These include a flattering headshot, a title superficially stirring but actually meaningless (see Kamala Harris’s “The Truths We Hold” or Ron DeSantis’s “The Courage to Be Free”) and above all a text that is gently self-congratulatory and so insipid as to be entirely unmemorable. Kristi Noem, the telegenic Republican governor of South Dakota plainly angling to be Donald Trump’s running-mate, has released her own contribution to this grand literary tradition. It succeeds on only two of these three counts: the photo looks expensively posed (with a gilt clock and feminist placard in the foreground and an American flag in background), and the title (“No Going Back”) is suitably vapid. But the contents are unfortunately memorable in the worst possible ways.