Okay, so Shane, you've had some interesting beach reading this year.

Yes, it's not how I expected to be spending my summer reading Mary Trump and John Bolton's books, but such is life.

Shane Harris reports on national security over at the Washington Post.

He's one of the few people out

there with early access to the latest Trump world tell-alls. There have been so many of them

over the last couple of years. You'd be forgiven for wondering, is there really any more to say?

But these latest books, Shane says, they've gotten particularly blunt. To be clear, one thing I found

actually kind of interesting about Mary Trump's book is she explicitly says she wants to take

down Donald Trump, so she's not hiding her cards on why she wants this book out now.

Mary Trump is Donald Trump's niece. Her book comes out next week. Shane's already absorbed all 240 pages of it.

Last month, it was John Bolton's memoir.

He was speed-reading.

I do think you can read them as companions.

I have no doubt that they weren't intended to be so.

But they're both making a strikingly similar argument,

or really set of arguments about Donald Trump.

Mary Trump's coming from the perspective of someone who knew him when she was growing up and knew him long before he became president.

And Bolton, obviously, the perspective of someone who worked with him very closely in the White

House as his national security advisor. And really the bottom line between these two books is that

Donald Trump is only in it for himself. He is without empathy. He is incapable of understanding

a greater good. Everything he does is motivated by his own self-interest.

And the argument that Mary Trump is making is he has always been this way.

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