Before Trump loyalist Kash Patel, who has been nominated to lead the FBI, answered questions at his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday, the New York Times’ David Fahrenthold examined Patel’s apparent use of his nonprofit Kash Foundation for self-promotion in the years between the two Donald Trump administrations. Among many things the foundation promoted—including Kash-branded T-shirts and scarves and a book for adults titled Government Gangsters—was a children’s book in which, Fahrenthold wrote, “a besieged King Donald is helped by a wizard named Kash.”
There are actually three Plot Against the King books, marketed as suitable for children “ages 3 and up.” They’re published by Brave Books, which was established in 2021, boasts celebrity authors like Kirk Cameron, Kevin Sorbo, and Bethany Hamilton, and describes itself as a “Christian publishing company that makes books for kids that reinforce biblically-based, foundational values.” Two of the Patel books are illustrated by James Scrawl and one by Laura Vincent, all in a colorful, derivative fantasy style. One book fictionalizes Russiagate and the Steele dossier, the second does the same with the 2020 election, and the third covers the Department of Justice’s lawsuits against Donald Trump. In each, the wizard Kash—all-knowing, all-discerning, bearing the sobriquet the “Distinguished Discoverer”—does battle against the enemies of the “merchant Donald,” who becomes “King Donald” after the people of the kingdom vote for him on “Choosing Day.”
These books read like someone fed storylines from the Trump era into an A.I. trained on MAGA posts on social media and gave it the command: “Tell this as a medieval story in a slightly funny way.” Democrat Adam Schiff plays a part in books one and three, first as “the shifty knight,” then a “shifty jester,” and then just as “Shifty.” The media are “heralds” who hate King Donald and accept any lie about him that Shifty tells. Hillary Clinton is “Hillary Queenton,” Biden is “Baron Von Biden,” Kamala Harris is “Comma-la-la-la,” and Mark Zuckerberg—who gets a cameo thanks to the Trumpworld idea that he participated in the 2020 election fraud—is “Mischievous Metamark.” The DOJ is a “Dragon of Jalapeños,” who gets small as a dog before eating hot peppers, then bigger when he’s fed some, until he breathes fire.
If I were a child reading these, and I were paying attention, I’d have questions. Why are people voting for a king? Why does Biden’s Choosing Day win result in a barony, rather than a kingship, like Donald got? Why is the “shifty knight” friends with the heralds? Why name Kamala “Comma-la-la-la” instead of “Commie-la,” which would make so much more sense, and be funnier, too? (OK, maybe a child wouldn’t trip up on that last one, but that seemed like a real missed opportunity to me.) Aren’t “heralds” usually working for the king, not just acting as freelance trumpeters of random news? Some of these murky bits could have used one more pass for a punch-up, but some of them are just the inevitable result of the comically transparent agenda here. Without a MAGA mindset, for example, you can’t explain why the heralds would hate King Donald so much that they’d lie about him, or why there are no “people of the Land of the Free” who have any genuine objections to Donald’s kingship.
Actually, MAGA-hardline ideas about Trump’s natural, never-ending popularity lend themselves well to a children’s story set in some nonspecific “olden times” location. One page in the second book in the series, the one about the 2020 election, shows people lining up by party to place ballots in boxes, like people used to do in the 19th-century United States. The line for the blue box has only Hillary Queenton, Comma-la-la-la, Shifty, and a few others in it, while the line for the red box stretches off into the distance. Of course Biden’s win was a fraud! You can see it with your own eyes.
Liberals publish plenty of incomprehensible, politically motivated children’s books. In fact, I’d argue that liberals pioneered the genre. Many well-meaning social-justice-y books for kids under 5 assume previous knowledge of abstract concepts, histories, and tropes that actual children regard with utter confusion. That, contra Ted Cruz’s grandstanding about poor little babies being made to feel guilt for being white, was the real problem with Antiracist Baby, the board-book version of which contained such iconically toddler-pleasing lines as “Nothing disrupts racism more than when we confess/the racist ideas that we sometimes express” and “Some people get more, while others get less/because policies don’t always grant equal access.”
Just as I doubt a 2-year-old would come away from that book feeling guilty (you have to engage and understand to feel guilt), I really doubt that the trio of Plot Against the King books, on the merits of their story or illustrations, will turn any children MAGA. The storylines don’t lend themselves very well to discussion, particularly the storyline of the first book, which is just as confusing as the Russiagate saga was to everyone but total news-hounds when it unfolded. But I don’t think that’s the point. It’s about sitting down and sharing your enthusiasm for political stories with your kid. And if people are doing that (thousands of five-star reviewers on Amazon say they are), the books are “working.”
Credit where it’s due, though. The river of poop created by the 2,000 mules that flows through the city on Choosing Day in the second book in this series, causing townspeople to trip and fall on their butts in the middle of the street? That’s pretty funny. I bet my kid would like it.
