Trump is pretending he’s being besieged with offers from top-class publishers longing to publish his “memoir” but publishers aren’t doing any besieging.

Their reluctance is driven by several factors, though the underlying fear is that whatever Trump would write wouldn’t be truthful.

“[I]t would be too hard to get a book that was factually accurate, actually,” said one major figure in the book publishing industry, explaining their reluctance to publish Trump. “That would be the problem. If he can’t even admit that he lost the election, then how do you publish that?”

By labeling it a novel?

Trump has insisted that he has suitors for a book too. In a statement last Friday, he said he had received two offers “from the most unlikely of publishers” but turned them down because he did “not want to do such a deal right now.”

Yes indeed and he didn’t want to go to that party he wasn’t invited to, he didn’t want to talk to that famous person who refused to talk to him, he didn’t want to win the election, he didn’t want to be taken seriously.

Trump didn’t reveal who the two publishers were. But in a statement on Monday afternoon to POLITICO, he insisted that “two of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses have made very substantial offers which I have rejected.”

Why not just name them instead of being coy?

Because they didn’t.

“That doesn’t mean I won’t accept them sometime in the future, as I have started writing the book,” the statement read. “If my book will be the biggest of them all, and with 39 books written or being written about me, does anybody really believe that they are above making a lot of money? Some of the biggest sleezebags [sic] on earth run these companies.”

Says the non-sleazebag who is not at all motivated by making a lot of money.

“No morals, no nothing, just the bottom line,” he added. “And they sure wouldn’t admit it before the fact. But after the fact, they will stand by and say, ‘Let’s go.’”

What fact?

POLITICO reached out to top publishers and editors at the “Big Five” publishing houses — Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, and Simon & Schuster — to see if they had heard anything about any such deals Trump had been offered. None of the sources said they had heard about such potential book offers, and most said they wouldn’t touch a Trump project when he does start shopping a book around.

“It doesn’t matter what the upside on a Trump book deal is, the headaches the project would bring would far outweigh the potential in the eyes of a major publisher,” said Keith Urbahn, president and founding partner of Javelin, a literary and creative agency. “Any editor bold enough to acquire the Trump memoir is looking at a fact-checking nightmare, an exodus of other authors, and a staff uprising in the unlikely event they strike a deal with the former president.”

Plus the whole feeling of living inside a septic tank.