David Baldacci: "As a thriller writer you’re only bounded by plausibility – and thanks to Trump, you can’t tell me anything’s implausible"

Since his debut Absolute Power thriller was published in 1996, David Baldacci has sold 150 million books. Were they to be stacked on top of each other, the pile would be approximately 3,750 kms high.

That’s according to ChatGPT which is great for daft trivia but poses an existential threat to all original content providers.

So much so that for the past couple of years David and his close friend John Grisham have been waging war against its creator, OpenAI.

“This is a hill I’m going to die on,” he told 60 Minutes Australia after his first unwelcome encounter with ChatGPT. “It had just come out and my son, who’s a lot more technologically savvy than I am, said, ‘Hey, dad, have you heard about this thing?’ I said, ‘No’, and he said, ‘Well, you should.’ So, he opened his laptop, went to the ChatGPT site and wrote in, ‘Write me a plot that sounds like a David Baldacci novel.’ And within one, two, three, four beats, there was a, I don’t know, five-page outline that was a mash of pretty much every book I’d ever written. Characters and plots and twists and turns and research and things like that.

“I was like, ‘How in the world were they able to do that?’ It really was like somebody had backed up a truck to my vault and stolen everything I’d ever created and then driven off with it in the middle of the night.”

In July 2025, Baldacci outlined those concerns to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism who appeared largely sympathetic.

When not on Capitol Hill, the 65-year-old from Richmond, Virginia averages a bestseller every six months – Hope Rises was out in April, All In hits shelves in November and there’s the return of Aloysius Archer to look forward to in April ’27 – and is trying to undo some of the damage done by Donald J. Trump and his minions by funding a civil discourse initiative.

His visit to HP Central is one of the last stops on a rock star-style promotional tour, which has also taken him to such glamorous UK locales as Ruislip, West Bromwich, Harrogate and Pontefract. Yep, it really is a case of “Have readers, will travel!”

After inspecting our basement gallery of classic Hot Press covers – “Oh my goodness, what a talent!” David says when he sees the Amy Winehouse: Valentine’s Day Mascara one – it’s down to interview business.

Congratulations on Hope Rises, which is your 54th adult novel. Does that sound crazy when people say it?

It does. I don’t count my birthdays anymore and I don’t count my books!

For Hot Press readers who’ve yet to meet him, who is Walter Nash/Dillon Hope?

He’s a businessman who’s never fired a gun in anger or lifted a weight in his life. Good education, worked hard, nice house, great family, made lots of money. He’s in finance and achieving the American Dream. One night it’s all taken away from him. The FBI show up and say, “The company you’ve been working for is a criminal organisation. Here are your choices: 1). You can help us bring ‘em down and lose everything you have. 2). You don’t help us bring ‘em down and lose everything you have.”

So, he has to reinvent himself fully. I like the thematic element of that because a lot of people thought they’d achieved the American Dream in real life and then had it taken away. They’re being told, “You’ll have to reinvent yourself now and pursue something else.”

My missus is not a great thriller fan but loves yours because the female characters – like Victoria Steers in Nash Falls and Hope Rises – kick as much ass as the male ones.

(Laughs) Yes, I don’t write about damsels in distress because I’ve never met one my entire life. My parents’ families were huge, so I had seventeen aunts on both sides. Most of them lived near us, so I saw women who were formidable and intelligent but, because of the time period they lived in, none of them were able to achieve their potential. The ceiling wasn’t glass back then; it was concrete. I’ve always respected how innately powerful, intelligent and resourceful the women I’ve known are. My mum was a force of nature. I’m married to a force of nature. We’ve raised a very independent-minded daughter. So, I write what I know about them.

Victoria Steers has all of those qualities you just mentioned – and a few more which aren’t so admirable! What can you tell us about her?

When I first started writing Nash Falls, I thought it was going to be one book only and she was going to suffer the fate that characters like her usually suffer. Then I thought, “You haven’t even scratched the surface with her. What makes this woman tick?” I realised that I needed a second book to not just explore her character, but also to bring her and Walter Nash/Dillon Hope together. The best part of these two novels is the symmetry and dynamic between them. It’s a cat and mouse game that’s turned into something much deeper.

I’m surprised that there haven’t been more TV and film adaptations of your books. Are they hard to navigate?

Yeah, definitely. Filmmakers tend to go for books with one big hook because they’re easier to translate onto the screen. Mine are a little more complicated and dense. There are a lot of characters and things going on. It’s not just the twists that matter. I don’t know if they’re all going to make it, but I have six projects in development at the moment. They’ve Amos Decker at Amazon, 6:20 Man and The Winner at Netflix, The Camel Club is at NBC, King And Maxwell is at AMC and Apple have the Will Robie series. If a couple of those come to fruition, I’ll be thrilled.

Do you hand them over lock, stock and barrel to the networks or are you involved in the screenwriting process?

What I tell every filmmaker is that “I’m here as a resource. Give me the script, I’ll give you notes. Give me the casting list, I’ll give you my comments. Any background you need on the characters, I’m there for you.” I don’t walk away from the adaptations, nor do I want a lot of control over them. (Laughs) Which means that if a project’s a hit I can take credit for it, and if it bombs it’s somebody else’s fault!

Where are you now with your case against OpenAI?

We’ve just finished discovery. That’s been three years of turning over my financial details, emails and every scrap of paper I’ve put my name to. I sat through a nine-hour deposition where they asked me questions like, “You wrote a novel called Strangers In Time, set in London in 1944. There’s an orphan boy called Charlie Mathers. Mr. Baldacci, have you read Oliver Twist? If you copied Charles Dickens, why are you suing our client for stealing your work?”

I looked at her and said, “Caitlin, is that really all you’ve got ‘cause I’m feeling pretty good about my case now.” There are eighteen other named claimants – John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, Michael Connolly, George R.R. Martin and Sylvia Day among them – and as part of the class action we represent 500,000 unnamed authors. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

You did far better than Pete Hegseth did last week at his hearing when he basically contradicted everything he’d previously said about the Iran War. Could you have conceived of a character like him?

No. I have a good imagination, but I look at this administration and all I can think of is the movie Dumb And Dumber. The Secretary of Health, Bobby Kennedy Jr., has admitted that a worm eat part of his brain. He was addicted to cocaine for twenty years. He doesn’t believe vaccines work. He’s head of our healthcare industry. Of all the Kennedys, he was the one to rise to the top and get a big job… and then made every wrong decision he could’ve made.

There was a time when J.D. Vance was a hot shot debut novelist. Did your literary paths ever cross?

Never did. I read Hillbilly Elegy when it first came out. I like a lot of it because that was the world my mother grew up in. Towards the end, though, he started unfairly blaming people for their problems. Firstly, capitalists took all the manufacturing jobs away and left communities with nothing. Then people got ill and disabled because there was no healthcare. A lot of them turned to opioids which the huge pharmaceutical companies said weren’t addictive. J.D. Vance blamed them because they did get addicted and died of overdoses. I have seen drug addiction through friends and family and know how incredibly difficult it is to beat. I also have immense anger for people and companies who’ve exploited it. When I write about drugs, that’s what powers my prose.

JD Vance

I got a real sense of that in your 2018 book, Fallen, which highlighted the depth of the U.S. opioid crisis. Were any other writers sounding the alarm back then?

I have a really good friend, Beth Macy who wrote Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors And The Drug Company That Addicted America. There’s also a TV series based on it. As a journalist, she really went the last mile to get into the heads and hearts of the people who were living in that desperate moment. Beth’s running for Congress in a very Trump part of Virginia, so my wife and I are doing a fundraiser for her. We hope that she can win as a Democrat.

Is there anything left of the Republican Party of old or is it gone for good?

I know a lot of Republican voters still out there who are not Trump supporters. They’re conservative but that’s not who they are. They have their principles. I’d say that 20-30% of the population are diehard MAGAs. That’s not enough to win any election, so I do think there’s hope somewhere down the line.

Donald J.’s latest wheeze is to sell early access to his Truth Social posts for $100,000 a month, so that subscribers can move their money round accordingly. How is that not insider trading?

It is the technical definition of insider trading. His whole schtick is, “If I tell you I’m doing it, it can’t be criminal because criminals hide what they do, right?” It was the same when people said to him, “Your sons are doing all these business deals, it seems like they had inside information.” He was like, “Yeah, of course they do. How can they not, they’re my sons.” But, hey, we spent four tears talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop! If the Democrats win in November, the first thing they need to do is have corruption trials because all these people need to go to prison.

After overturning Roe vs. Wade and generally being Trump’s judicial lapdogs, the Supreme Court is finally starting to act in a non-partisan fashion. What’s going on?

The swing justices (Amy Coney Barrett and John G. Roberts Jr.) have given Trump a lot of what he wanted but I guess they have some principles left and don’t want to go so far that it completely tarnishes their reputation. I’m a member of the Supreme Court bar and I’m ashamed of what they’ve done.

You grew up during segregation, which was only fully lifted in Virginia in 1971. How did that impact you?

Well, my elementary school had no black kids in it. Then, in my sixth-grade year when I was twelve, it was announced that we were going to be bussed to an inner city school. Everybody in our neighbourhood was appalled because instead of walking to class, we were being driven somewhere miles away. So, they had this thing called Save Our Neighborhood Schools. I remember riding with my parents to Washington D.C. and them driving around honking their horn in protest. I suddenly found myself in class with kids I didn’t know. It was almost like the adults said, “This is too complicated for us to figure out, we’re going to let the twelve-year-olds do it.”

Thereafter, I played football and did wrestling at high school, so it was okay for me to have black friends because they were teammates. I had an excuse to go to their house and vice versa. For a lot of kids who didn’t play sports, that wall remained for a depressingly long time. Along with sport, my other escape from all of that was books. They were my window on the world.

Having lived through that, it must be unsettling to have somebody like Stephen Miller in the White House.

Every time I see Stephen Miller I just want to throw up. Naively, I thought that prejudice would eventually die out through Darwinism, but each generation hands down its own hatred and anger. Racial prejudice is the easiest one to stoke – it’s the quintessential ‘othering’. Authoritarians need to have an object of hatred they can point at and tell people, “Look at them, they’re not like you and are coming to take everything you have.” Hopefully the pendulum will swing back but it’s in the playbook and works well.

Who is the most viable presidential candidate for the Democrats?

Okay, there are two. Andy Beshear who’s the Governor of Kentucky, a deeply red state. He’s photogenic, articulate, went to my law school and is like the anti-J.D. Vance. He can talk to anybody about anything, he’s very comfortable in himself. There’s also a senator running for re-election in Georgia, John Ossoff, who’s 39, brilliant, incredible speaker and has those oratorial moments that Obama had. He’s all-inclusive and wants to bring the country together.

There’s a great Netflix documentary about Ed Sullivan, the ‘50s/‘60s TV host who insisted on platforming black artists like Ella Fitzgerald, The Jackson 5 and Little Stevie Wonder when they were otherwise banned from primetime. Is there anybody today trying to drag America out of the mire?

There are a lot of writers and musicians who are trying to do it through their work and fanbase. Billionaires less so. They’re too busy chasing even more money. But there are people out there who know that if we keep going along this path, we’re going to have a second civil war. We have more guns per capita than any country on earth and a lot of them are in the hands of people who don’t share my beliefs. The midterms are coming up in November. Trump’s already talking about voter fraud. Maybe he’ll send some soldiers in, and we won’t have the elections. With the militias roaming around, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but the idea of armed struggle is by no means fanciful.

You and your wife, Michelle, have donated $13 million to the Virginian Commonwealth University’s nonpartisan Civil Discourse and Collaboration initiative. What does that entail?

We’re kicking things off locally in September with David Brooks, the former New York Times columnist who’s coming down to speak. Then we’re going to take the show on the road across the Commonwealth of Virginia and provide opportunities and venues for people to come together and have community discussions, like we used to all the time. I envisage town halls with no politicians, just citizens. When you’re anonymous on social media and there’s no accountability, people are cruel and mean-spirited and the vitriol flies. It’s much harder to be like that when you’re sitting across the table from someone, so that’s what we’re going to try to do.

David and his wife, Michelle Baldacci

November 5 is D-Day for your fourth 6:20 novel, All In. What can you tell us about it?

A man and a woman run into each other in Manhattan. They’re having an argument and all of a sudden four guys in black hoods come out, shoot the woman and take the man. Because he’s part of an intelligence gathering service called Five Eyes, Travis Devine is brought in to find him. When the man’s body ends up in Sydney harbour, Devine has to go down under. Then next spring I bring back Aloysius Archer who’s my gumshoe detective in 1950s Los Angeles. On this tour, I’ve written the first five chapters of a novel which will be out in fall 2027. It’s brand-new characters and something I’d never previously thought about doing. I’m getting to the age now where my opportunities are more and more limited. I’m not getting any younger, so want to pick my projects with great care. Whatever I do next has to be meaningful, not just to readers but to me.

Do you ever take time off?

My whole life feels like time off because I’m getting to do what I love. When I’m at my worst is between books. I feel like I’m lost in space and have no sense of purpose. My wife says, “He’s miserable, everyone stay away from him!” So, it’s better for everyone that I’m writing.

Which of your recurring characters do you most identify with and/or want to be?

Amos Decker my memory man would be one. He’s got perfect recall, which is kind of nice, but it also means he can’t forget anything. We all have things we’d rather forget, right? He’s an interesting guy; I like getting into his head. The other would be Oliver Stone from the Camel Club. He’s such a fascinating character and I’d like to spend more time with him.

Do your plots now have to be crazier because of Trump?

I think of an outlandish plot and a couple of weeks later I open the Washington Post and there’s my story. They’ve nicked my plotline! At the same time, as a thriller writer you’re only bounded by plausibility and, thanks to Trump, you can’t tell me anything’s implausible.

There are a lot to choose from, but what are a couple of your career highlights that you wouldn’t swap for anything?

I got a fan letter from Barbara Bush who liked my novel very much. Then I was in a famous Washington bookstore called Politics and Prose. It was right before Thanksgiving and they’d asked me to come and hand-sell books as part of this thing they do called Small Business Saturday.

All of a sudden while I’m doing this, police come in with bomb-sniffing dogs and go through the whole place. Then uniformed secret service come in followed by guys in suits and sunglasses. I’m like, “What the hell’s going on?” and then Obama and his two teenage daughters appear. The owner goes over to him says, “Mr. Obama, I just want to let you know that David Baldacci’s here.” And Obama stops right in the middle of the store and goes, “David Baldacci? He’s famous!”

• David Baldacci’s Hope Rises is out now published by MacMillan. All In hits shelves on November 5.