A dozen sitting U.S. senators published books last year, including big names such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York).
But a book by Sen. John Neely Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican who is a regular on Fox News but hardly a household name, outsold all the rest of them last year — combined — according to data from NPD BookScan.
“How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will” has spent 15 weeks on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list, including several weeks at No. 1 — a rare achievement for any book, but especially one by a senator. Among political books published last year, only former vice president Kamala Harris’s campaign memoir, “107 Days,” appears to have sold more copies, according to the data. Kennedy’s book remains one of the 100 best-selling books on Amazon — which includes new books as well as classics — nearly four months after it was published.
Unlike many of the best-selling political books of President Donald Trump’s first term, “How to Test Negative for Stupid” is not primarily about Trump. Instead, it is part-memoir, part-insider account of the Senate, all told in Kennedy’s indefatigably folksy, simile-heavy way of speaking.
One of the most successful recent books by a sitting senator was “Al Franken, Giant of the Senate,” which laced the Minnesota Democrat and “Saturday Night Live” veteran’s thoughts on politics with jokes. Matt Latimer, a co-founder of Javelin, a Washington literary agency, wondered if a conservative senator could write a similar book.
Kennedy immediately came to mind, Latimer said.
Kennedy has earned a reputation since his election in 2016 as perhaps the most quotable senator. (Democrats branded him “Senator Soundbite” in 2018 as he considered running for governor.) “Tariffs are like whiskey,” Kennedy told Fox News last year in a typical quip. “A little whiskey under the right circumstances can be refreshing. Too much whiskey under the wrong circumstances and you end up drunk as a goat.”
But he is also an Oxford-educated lawyer who spent 17 years as Louisiana’s state treasurer — the first seven as a Democrat — then switched parties as his state grew redder.
“He’s able to make fun of himself, make fun of Washington, make fun of his colleagues, poke fun at just the whole process and system,” said Latimer, whose agency represented Kennedy. “Where is the book that fails that makes fun of Washington?”
The blunt title helped, as did Kennedy’s repeat appearances on Fox News. Amazon sales spiked every time the book was mentioned on the network, Latimer said.
“Senator, if it’s anything like the way you speak, that book’s going to be a huge hit,” Jason Chaffetz, the former Republican congressman from Utah, told Kennedy on Fox News in December.
The books may sound like Kennedy because he dictated the first draft while sitting at his kitchen table in Madisonville, Louisiana. Unwilling to use a digital voice recorder, he bought an old analog Dictaphone on eBay, he said; then a second Dictaphone when the first one broke. He organized and revised the transcript with the help of an editor, he said, going through six or eight drafts.
“I wrote it myself,” Kennedy said in a brief interview. “I wrote it in my voice. Sometimes the tendency when a politician writes a book is to sit down and try to explain how you would remake the world, and you deal exclusively in policy — and that can be very boring. So the way I did it, I talk a lot about policy in the book, but it’s not a policy book per se. It’s a story book.”
“How to Test Negative for Stupid” is part of a small boom in books by senators. (Senators are more tempting targets for literary agents than representatives because House rules ban members from accepting book advances, following scandals involving former speakers Jim Wright and Newt Gingrich.)
The 12 books published by senators last year is the highest number in a single year in more than five decades, according to a Post analysis of data from the Senate Historical Office and the Senate Library. They include memoirs, books about China and antisemitism and “Leo’s Lunch Box,” a children’s book by Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Georgia).
Like Kennedy, other senators have tried to avoid writing what Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) — whose book, “It Takes Chutzpah: How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change,” was published last year — described as the typical Senate book.
“’Look at all the wonderful things that I’ve done,’” Wyden said. “’Two, look at all the people that want me to run for president. And three, ‘I don’t know if I can do it because I’m a family guy.’ That is the formulaic senator’s book.”
“How to Test Negative for Stupid” mocks Washington, but it is more hopeful — and more sophisticated — about politics than its pessimistic title might suggest.
Kennedy covers his years at Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia Law School and Oxford, where he earned another law degree out of a desire to “compete with the best.” He freely references Immanuel Kant, Jean-Paul Sartre and St. Augustine. He explains the Daubert standard and the C-band spectrum.
Kennedy repeatedly praises Trump, though he adds that the president “can be cruel” and that the two of them are “very different people in personality and style, and sometimes we disagree on issues.”
He also devotes a full chapter to his detailing his efforts to persuade Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump’s other Justice Department nominees to resist the temptation to prosecute Trump’s political opponents in same the way that he argues the Justice Department unfairly targeted Trump during the Biden administration.
Since Bondi’s confirmation, the Justice Department has tried to persuade grand juries to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James B. Comey and has opened a criminal investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell, all of whom Trump has raged against. Still, Kennedy said he could not evaluate whether the Justice Department had heeded his advice because he had not seen the relevant grand jury testimony and other evidence.
“Are they calling them like they see them?” Kennedy told reporters this month. “I can’t answer that question unless I saw the facts on which they’re acting.”
Kennedy dishes on some of his colleagues in the book, recounting how Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and the late Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) cursed at each other in a closed-door Senate Republican lunch.
“Schumer, when he cuts loose, is like a five-year-old in a Batman costume on a sugar high,” Kennedy writes.
He describes Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) as a friend but adds that he wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Graham “was suspended twenty-three times in junior high school. In February alone.”
“Sometimes I think his motto is Don’t be part of the problem — be the whole problem,” Kennedy writes of Graham. “But he’ll say the quiet part out loud too, and I respect that. He’s also unpredictable. Invite him to dinner, and you don’t know if he’ll sit down for an intelligent conversation or get drunk and vomit in the fish tank. But that’s why I like him.”
Kennedy did not run those anecdotes by his colleagues before publishing them, he said, though he tried not to include anything that would violate a confidence or embarrass anyone.
“I lied to Tom’s mother,” Kennedy said, referring to Cotton. “I told her that Tom really didn’t say that — which I don’t think she believes me.”
But Kennedy also praises his colleagues in both parties, even as he mocks Washington as “a place full of deceptive, ambitious, self-absorbed ex-class presidents who would unplug your life-support system to charge their cell phones.”
He expresses regret for suggesting in 2023 that Harris was unintelligent, “because I like Kamala Harris.” And he lauds Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) in particular, warning that anyone who dislikes them is “going straight to hell.”
“It’s perilous to start singling out senators I like because it’s unfair,” Kennedy writes. “I’m not kidding: I like them all.”
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