Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/19/hands-on-review-of-trumps-cheap-bible-video.html
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Trump can’t acknowledge it was likely made in Asia as people would be concerned the bamboo fibers in the paper could be used to hack their prayers. And any prayers for a Trump victory would be deliberately miscounted by an Italian satellite, and would be changed into prayers for Biden.
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The funny thing to me is that this thing is now the “Trump” Bible when it’s been out for a couple of years, as this guy points out, with no association with Trump until a couple of months ago. It’s so obviously a grift. From both Trump and Greenwood.
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His final verdict is that this is basically a $20 Walmart-quality Bible with a $75 price tag (shipped). That’s honestly better than I would have expected from the grifter in chief.
Also I appreciate his view that combining a Bible and the American founding documents is insulting to both.
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Crap- haven’t thought of that.
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“I would be shocked if Donald Trump was promoting a Bible that was printed bound in China”
I wouldn’t. Why would anyone be shocked by that? I mean, all his clothing items were made there and Mexico and even said so on the labels, even as he tore down those countries and denounced trade with them. If he’s willing to be that ironic, a Bible printed in China is nothing. Especially since he’s just lending his name to sell an existing product. He does. not. care.
Okay, so cheap materials, likely printed in China, similar items are being sold - at a profit - for less than $20… that’s a hell of a profit margin for each book. Which is exactly what I expected, given this whole thing is just a money laundering scheme so churches and other religious non-profits can funnel him money.
The collection of documents is more hilarious than I expected - the Bible, (some of) the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence (so you can have references to God and country), the Pledge of Allegiance (getting pretty random, but again, it’s a quasi-official bit of text and God is in there!) and… Lee Greenwood song lyrics? What a mess - the Christian nationalist wet-dream Bible…
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Agreed. He’d get happy to bulldoze all the national forests and all libraries, turning the wood/books into bibles for sale or his biographies, and the ground to golf courses. Just printing stuff in whatever country is cheapest is unsurprising.
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About a minute in there’s this:
I must have at least a thousand books by now, and none slump over like a soggy pancake. Only ephemera like magazines and pamphlets do this. What a cheap piece of shit.
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That doesn’t seem unusual for a Bible. I’ve got a few that flop that way.
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About how much did you pay for them? Re quality, don’t people usually want something substantial and robust enough to last so they can be handed down with family history notes written in i.e., birthdates and such?
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I didn’t. They are all family.
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Gotcha!
BTW: The video made me curious about how thin book paper could be, and it turns out the thinnest made is called “bible paper”. I did not know that. Apparently, the aim is to make bible books (with their numerous pages) as thin and as light as possible. Yet the fellow in the video expressed a concern with the paper’s semi-translucency. If such “bible paper” is to be expected in some bibles, then the fellow’s concern is odd, given the many bibles he’s said to have handled and reviewed. In other words, he didn’t say, Oh, here’s another bible with bible paper that one can see through. So, I’m wondering if the maker really cheaped out and used a low-density paper pulp (assuming anything like that exists or is even considered.)
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Probably a glimpse into his thinking.
Basically, it’s a patriot bible, it’s not a great typeface, it’s priced like a premium bible, but feels cheap.
I have a couple bibles in my house-- inherited-- but this is my favorite. This is the one I bought with my own money,
So, yeah. I don’t know how one might correctly estimate the value of a bible, because I don’t have a use for one. Other than this.
My daily devotional-- knowing where the pronouns go.
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I think it must be a poor quality paper, because bibles or other books with very thin pages, when well made, do not let the text show through. I have a children’s bible with a few illustrations that I received as a child that has a floppy cover and thin pages and is nevertheless very high quality. Honesty, I wish more very voluminous literary classics were printed and bound in the same style. Floppy and thin, but tough.
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A few other questions about this book:
Why does the version of the US Constitution at the back only show 10 Amendments, and not all 27?
Why does the book switch among papers, from thin to cardstock?
How much bleedthrough does the thin paper used for this Bible text experience when underlining, marking up or highlighting?
How accurate is the wording relative to the source material? Has anyone checked for typos and substitutions?
How many copyrights does this book violate? Greenwood’s song alone is protected until he’s been dead 70 years yet it’s in there with no copyright notice.
The new version has a fake leather cover; did Greenwood’s original?
Re-stating the reviewer’s question: is this, trump’s version, printed in China?
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One does wonder why they stopped at ten amendments.
I’d guess that the switch to different stuff at the end was that the printer was already printing the bible parts and just added the patriotic stuff at the end and bound it with that particular cover on request.
Copyright notice isn’t actually required since they passed the 1976 copyright act.
I am under the impression that these ARE the “original” Greenwood versions that have been sitting unsold since they were printed. As it turns out he is not popular enough to convince people to overpay ~200% for a cheapish bible.
Dollars to doughnuts that this was printed in China, although it might have been printed in another low-cost country.
I’m an atheist, but if I was a Christian, I would be bothered by the addition of profane* texts.
- not profane in the modern sense of profanity, but in the original sense of “not holy.”
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… the sort of people who want to mix the Bible and the Constitution together might tend to have some reservations about Amendments 13 to 16 
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Yeah. The whole idea of the American Revolution was that it was a humanistic endeavour [1]. Using a humanist typeface would put it into that 18th century enlightenment context.
Then again, the first line of the declaration of independence does use a broken script. Not blackletter, mind, but a gothic display script nonetheless.
Well, it was about tax policy. But the intellectual elite of the colony thought of it as an enlightenment project, and they’re the ones that wrote the document ↩︎
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