Trump and Children's Literature

Abstract

Donald Trump has overlapped with children's culture since the early 1990s, yet since his presidency, his appearance has become ubiquitous in children's literature. To survey Trump's controversial presence throughout such literature is to witness the ways contemporary publishers grapple with American presidential history, indoctrination, politics, and even supply and demand.

Donald Trump's association with children's culture begins in the early 1990s with his cameo appearance in the film Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and, more importantly for this project, in Arthur Yorinks's Christmas in July (1991) and Maurice Sendak's We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993). With illustrator Richard Egielski, Yorinks humorously depicts the story of a tempestuous, wealthy, New York businessman named "Rich Rump" who steals Santa Claus's pants, in turn postponing Christmas for several months until his "icy heart" warms and he returns the pants.¹ Sendak reappropriates two nursery rhymes to illuminate how Trump's corrupt business practices (the dumps) have considerably harmed children (Jack and Guy) by inspiring violence, disrupting communities, and ignoring a health crisis—all ironically prescient of Trump's presidential actions during COVID-19 and the 2020 election. Sendak's anti-capitalist tone appears in an early image, where a boy lives in a box labeled "private party" and multiple children beg for "help" while corporate-minded rats steal what little wealth the children have, all under the page title, "WE ARE ALL IN THE DUMPS." Then, near the Brooklyn Bridge, Sendak depicts rats gambling with diamonds, children dressed in rags, and newspaper headlines alerting readers to the HIV crisis, all under the second line of the poem: "FOR DIAMONDS ARE TRUMPS." Responding to the word "trumps," the following double spread depicts a chorus-like group of children frightened by the rats violently kidnapping the book's only character of color (see fig. 1). The children scream, "Tricked," "Trumped," and "Dumped," with the "Trumped" speech bubble placed adjacent to a "Tower" sign on a building, thereby juxtaposing the unrelenting capitalism associated with the Trump Tower with the suffering in the streets. Sendak dresses these children in newspapers with headlines advertising cheap real estate, poor mortgage deals, the failings of big banks, starvation, food relief shortages, and homelessness, all of which were major economic concerns at the book's publication. His 1993 juxtaposition of Trump Towers with a health crisis, chaos in the streets, and wealth inequality is uncannily proleptic, as is the nursery rhyme's line "AND THE HOUSES ARE BUILT WITHOUT WALLS," which anticipates Trump's "Build That Wall" promise and the many books discussed later in this article that take up this debate. Further, the images of children living in boxes look eerily like the results of Trump's so-called "Zero Tolerance" immigration policies.² Indeed, it is the single infant of color who suffers most in Sendak's Trumped-up streets, crying for "help," only to be ignored by the rats, ironically dressed in hearts and truthfully dressed in diamonds.

Fig 1.

We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy by Maurice Sendak, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Copyright © 1993 by Maurice Sendak. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Sendak's perspicacious association of Trump with political problems of the 1980s and 1990s anticipates the forty-fifth president's anomalous influence on children's literature depicting American presidents. Educational texts frequently blur the mythology of American exceptionalism with biography to provide young readers with a kid-friendly version of history. As will be discussed, the mythologization of American history and American presidents does not at all begin with Trump; it is part and parcel virtually to the entire subgenre. However, it has significantly escalated since Trump's inauguration, and found its way ubiquitously into children's culture. Such intensification is coeval with a larger reassessment of American history during the Trump era. Just as publishers and culture writ large have grappled with an understanding of America's complex history, presidential or otherwise, numerous books have emerged that continue to map onto Trump the narrative of a flawless president, with just as many books casting him as a new archetypal villain. These representations highlight a type of villainy that combines unchecked capitalism, sexism, racism, and bullying while commenting on wealth inequality and white masculinity. Further, several pro-Trump books now exist via the growing popularity of print-on-demand (henceforth POD) publishing, especially Amazon Prime. Today's POD services offered by Amazon and other e-commerce vendors and used frequently to spread unchecked political opinions recall an earlier cheap, but highly effective, way of spreading (mis) information in early modern England: pamphlets. To contextualize Amazon's POD platforms with pamphlet culture is to recognize how, like early modern pamphlet culture, these platforms are being used to spread unchecked political hegemony.

What follows, then, is a study of roughly three dozen children's books that engage with America's Trump-era political culture, including educational biographies, POD propaganda, and books about bullying and wall building. This tripartite essay showcases the continued problems of educational biographies claiming objectivity, the use of POD to spread mis- and disinformation, and the arrival of a new villainous prototype based on a sitting president who would eventually be indicted on April 4, 2023. In other words, Trump's influence on contemporary children's literature and the controversy surrounding several mainstream presidential biographies exposes how educational books are no longer able to mythologize American presidents without significant cultural backlash. The consequences of such as shift, however, are that at least two new markets for redirecting presidential mythologization have emerged, one in which POD texts maintain the narrative of a selfless, self-made, political outsider who heroically defied political corruption, and another that defines its villains as characters specifically committed to egotism, bullying, and division. To survey Trump's highly contentious presence throughout multiple genres of children's literature is to witness the ways publishers grapple with American history, awareness, mythology, indoctrination, and even supply and demand. Putting these texts in conversation with one another attends to the complex influence Trump maintains throughout children's culture and clarifies the dire need to take seriously how readers understand presidential history.

Informational Books about Presidents

Writing a conventional, educational biography of Trump for young readers is a difficult assignment. From his Obama birther conspiracy and controversial comments about Mexicans to his travel ban on Muslims, his inappropriate behavior around women, his insensitive mocking of a disabled reporter, his pugnacious encouragement of supporters to attack the Capital, and his insistence that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him, Trump's actions challenge those biographers horrified by truculence. Of course, no administration is without its controversies, and the struggle to pen honest presidential biographies existed long before Trump. As James Loewen explains in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995), textbooks on American history tend to turn "flesh-and-blood individuals into pious creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interests," which speaks to how so many books about presidents skew these biographies through simplification (19). However, despite this abiding "heroification" of American history, presidential or otherwise, such simplification has been reconfigured, normalized, and amplified during and following Trump's administration (19).

Further, the nature of Trump's biography, his controversies, and the recorded evidence of them makes the task of presenting his biography to children without parallel. After all, Trump's résumé is unique in that it does not contain any of the traditional mythologizing potential associated with other presidents. He is the only president who never previously held public office. Instead, his professional life was spent turning high profits in low-income neighborhoods before becoming a bankrupt real estate magnate. Then he became tabloid fodder, then a professional wrestler, then a reality show celebrity and influencer, and finally a populist politician. He is not a veteran, but instead likely lied about a foot injury and deferred from military service on no fewer than five occasions.³ His story does not fit into the ostensible narrative of the American Dream. Hardly born into poverty, his father loaned Trump as much as sixty million dollars throughout the 1970s.⁴ Finally, he does not represent so-called traditional family values espoused by his followers, having fathered children from multiple marriages, been accused of multiple extramarital affairs, and repeatedly expressed his physical attraction to Ivanka (his first daughter) once she became a teenager (Withnall).

For us as scholars, this question arises: How will American children's literature, given its educational and economical investment in the sub-genre of presidential history, react to such a transgressive figure? It is reasonable to expect differences between Trump books and those of previous presidents. In other words, how will Trump biographies fit into the larger, already problematic, tendency to mythologize American presidents? As Joanne Mattern, author of more than 250 books for young readers, explained in a 2017 interview with the New York Times, "for a children's audience, the mandate is to provide facts with a dusting of the context required to maintain accuracy." Scholastic group editor Joan Costa Knufinke similarly explains how the publishing company makes "an effort to show both points of view" (qtd. in Rosman). Such books claim to offer apolitical depictions of Trump. Carole Marsh's Donald Trump: America's 45^th President (2016), for example, introduces readers to Trump via trivia, games, coloring exercises, and puzzles. However, although the first page acknowledges that Trump was "very outspoken, and many Americans either strongly supported or strongly opposed his lies and positions," the book fails to include any examples of his divisive comments (Marsh 4). Instead of Trump's own words, the opening image is a caricature of him in the Oval Office with a speech bubble that awkwardly reads, "Have fun with facts, trivia, puzzles and more all about me and my job—President!" (1). However unintentionally, the author's instruction for readers to "Have fun with facts" sets the tone for how so many of these texts loosely engage with Trump's biography. Marsh includes only one quotation from Trump, the concluding remarks from his announcement for candidacy: "Quite simply, it is time to bring real leadership to Washington. The fact is, the American Dream is dead—but if I win, I will bring it back, bigger and better and stronger than ever before. Together, we will make America great again!" (12). Despite operating under the premise of desiring objectivity, the decision to include this sentence—and exclude all others from this same speech—is political: the text denies child readers a complete understanding of Trump's presidential beginnings, and it suppresses many of the most representative statements of his campaign. Rather than elaborating on the parts of the speech that caused companies such as NBC, Macy's Univision, and NASCAR immediately to disassociate themselves from Trump—"When Mexico sends its people … they're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with them. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crimes. They're bringing rapists"—Marsh includes a much more flattering depiction of Trump, such as a page titled "Cool Donald Trump" that celebrates his smart phone, movie and television preferences, popular social media accounts, and hobbies (8). Marsh's Trump spends time with his family, golfs, is devoted to his wife, and solely benefits from a life of hard work, never mentioning his father's nor grandfather's successes.

As similarly exemplified by Jill Sherman's Donald Trump: Outspoken Personality and President (2017) and TIME for Kids' Presidents of the United States (2017), educational books superficially seek middle ground in their biographical accounts. Cutler and Lasevoli offer brief historical biographies of all the presidents and generally include a round depiction of presidents, as when they acknowledge that Jefferson both wrote the Declaration Independence and enslaved more than 600 people during his lifetime (16–17). Regarding Trump, Cutler and Lasvoli include both his business successes and failures, and they also blandly reference that "Trump faced scandals and criticism [over] controversial remarks about several groups of people, including Latinos, Muslims, African Americans, and women" (67), again withholding details from the child reader, despite their pretense of educating them. By comparison, Sherman's biography begins with Trump's press conference in June 2015, likewise electing not to include Trump's own words, other than his slogan—borrowed from Reagan and Clinton—to "make America great again."⁵ At times, Sherman honestly acknowledges that Trump "made bold and controversial statements about the economy and about immigration" (9), that "Many people said Trump's comment[s] were racist" (37), and that he "faced immediate backlash after his announcement" (37). Likewise, she details both Trump's successful business endeavors and some of those that ended in bankruptcy, yet the level of detail she uses to discuss his business work is lacking when she turns to his political career. When she does bring up a few of the controversies of his campaign, she offers a positive spin: "Throughout his campaign, Trump made other controversial statements that some people considered to be offensive. But Trump stood by his statements. He thought it was important to state his views honestly" (37).⁶ In so doing, Sherman suggests to the child reader that because Trump's controversial statements were "honestly" made and he "stood by" them, his behavior and ideas are acceptable, while ignoring that such candor and recalcitrance are precisely the concern for many people. Likewise, approximately three hundred words are given to the complex financial history of the Taj Mahal casino, and eleven words are given to Neil Gorsuch's confirmation: "In January, Trump nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court" (39). Of Twitter, Sherman merely writes, "President Trump continued to use Twitter to post frequently about his actions in office," ignoring the thousands of false statements and controversial Tweets that eventually would lead to his removal from the platform (41). So, while Trump in many ways is an unconventional president, these biographies conventionally slip into the practice of mythologizing questionable behavior and rhetoric into strong business leadership. To a greater extent, they propagandistically deny young readers access to complete, nuanced discussions of Trump despite being marketed as educational.

Likewise, Journey to the Presidency (2017), written anonymously and published by Baby Professor, a POD company, maintains this incomplete narrative of a successful businessman who rose to popularity as a political outsider. It is reinforced with photos that associate Trump with the New York Military Academy at West Point, the University of Pennsylvania, realty development in Manhattan, pop culture, and images from his family life, all of which are surrounded with American flags that normalize Trump's brand of flag-waving patriotism. Yet the book does offer a counternarrative, as in its discussion of The Apprentice and the statement NBC released in 2016: "Due to the recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants, NBC Universal is ending its business relationship with Mr. Trump." Nevertheless, when it discusses Trump's long-term involvement with Miss USA, Miss Universe, and Miss Teen USA, it depicts these pageants as successful business ventures, excluding the dozens of teenage girls and young women who stated that Trump spent time in the changing rooms with the contestants as they undressed between competitions, which he routinely confirmed and even boasted about with radio personality Howard Stern throughout the 1990s (Stuart). When discussing Trump's campaign against Clinton, the Baby Professor biography calls it a "bitter and hard-fought election, with both nominees becoming entangled in scandals," neglecting the barrage of sexism and general rancor Trump employed against Clinton, and, as a result, participating in the dismissal of women who have spoken against Trump.⁷ A few pages later, in a otiose attempt at middle ground, the text references the "FBI's conclusion of the investigation into [Clinton's] email controversy," yet omits the fact that she was found innocent. Of Trump's ban on Muslims entering the country, Baby Professor states that on "January 27, 2017, [Trump signed] an order that suspended admission of refugees for 120 days and also denied entry to citizens of Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Iran and Iraq for 90 days, citing security concerns regarding terrorism. The administration later seemed to reverse part of the order, effectively exempting visitors that had a valid green card," yet denies the child reader an explanation of the word "seemed," in turn softening the racism associated with this ban.

Joanne Mattern's President Donald Trump (2017), initially published as part of Scholastic's Rookie Biography Series, has received the most popular attention of all these early biographies. These quarto-sized books combine words with photographic timelines to familiarize young readers with presidents. Mattern's Trump is again a successful businessman and political outsider wanting to bring a new government to America. She simplifies Trump's business ventures, describing him as a "famous entrepreneur" and "television personality" (5). Instead of mentioning the five military deferments Trump received while enrolled at an Ivy League university, Mattern writes that Trump "learned discipline" and "how to be a leader" at "military school," again misrepresenting for child readers major parts of Trump's military background—such as the fact that he had none—and instead feeding into the myth of his unparalleled respect for the military (6). Mattern also chooses to ignore instances when Trump publicly mocked veterans and POWs, as when he claimed John McCain was "not a war hero … because he was captured" (qtd. in Goldberg). Rather, Mattern goes on to say that "Many people were happy" when Trump won the candidacy, and they "looked forward to a brand-new government" (26). Omitting Trump's loss of the popular vote by more than seven million votes, however, spuriously amplifies such happiness while dispensing with the division that consequentially emerged from Trump's campaign and win.

Despite the tradition of unrelentingly positive depictions of presidents in primary and secondary education, the public response to this Scholastic publication alerts us to the significant changes Trump's presidency is having on both the business and educational parts of children's book publishing. In a public review of Mattern's book, for example, Kathleen Nganga and Sarah Cornelius—writing for Social Justice Books, a website devoted to "teaching for change," and also under the Twitter and Tumblr handle "@StepUpScholastic"—spoke against this incomplete and even celebratory depiction of Trump, eventually leading Scholastic to suspend publication of President Donald Trump. Be that as it may, Mattern is not entirely to blame for this affirming depiction of Trump. In an interview with the New York Times, she explained that in another Scholastic publication, President Donald Trump (A True Book) (2017), she originally included a page titled "Troubling Statements," which read, "Some of Trump's biggest supporters were white nationalists. Their comments and actions during and after the campaign were racist and often dangerous. Trump did little to speak against them" (qtd. in Rosman). In the final draft of the book, Rosman explains, "'Troubling Statements' had been changed to 'Campaign Statements' [and the] section about discrimination was modified to read, 'Some of Trump's critics felt he did not speak out against prejudicial people and groups strongly enough.'"⁸

Such attempts at a purportedly apolitical biography even drew the ire of right-wing media. Despite the removal of Trump's coarse actions, language, and his own racist campaign promises, many commentators on this side of the spectrum find the book to be radically left-leaning as they attempt to walk the line between their frustration over the discontinuance of the book's publication with their resentment over the its supposed liberal agenda. In an article anonymously written for The Daily Caller, a right-wing opinion news website founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and pundit Neil Patel in 2010, the writer cautions, "You should be careful before buying your child a book about the presidents. The New York Times spoke with children's book authors this week. The authors complained that their chosen profession expected them to be unbiased, and excerpts from a few books reveal that even their attempts to be 'unbiased' fall well short." Misleadingly disguised as circumspection, what follows is commentary on the Rosman article. As but one example, the writer for the Daily Caller protests Mattern's factual comment that "Some of Trump's critics felt he did not speak out against prejudicial people and groups strongly enough."

Similar debates are to be found across multiple presidential biographies, not only Trump's. For example, one year before Trump's inauguration, Scholastic pulled A Birthday Cake for George Washington (2016) based on its overtly joyful depiction of enslaved people cooking for the first president. Further, whereas a text such as the Caldecott winning So You Want to Be President? (2000) celebrates the diversity of American presidents in terms of their educational level, employment, heights and weights, pets, and personalities to suggest optimistically anyone can grow up to become president, recent texts offer a more nuanced depiction of who is elected and how. Marc Frey and Todd Davis's illustrated encyclopedia The New Big Book of U.S. Presidents (2017), for instance, devotes one or two pages to each president so "readers can easily relive the course of American history though a detailed timeline, vivid photographs, information about each president's term in office, and the major political issues of each era." The entry on Washington acknowledges that he managed a plantation in Virginia and includes sections devoted to some of the major roles played by "Native Americans, Blacks, and Women" during colonial and revolutionary America. Likewise, in Jefferson's entry, the authors include information about the slave trade. Notable controversies of Nixon, Johnson, Clinton, Bush, and others also are covered. With Trump, the text continues the conventional narrative of successful businessman and political outsider before asserting that "Not everyone was a fan," "he made many negative remarks about immigrants," and "he was ridiculed for his proposal to build a wall"; the entry also establishes that many world leaders feared he did "not understand how to handle world issues," and that "Trump's ignorance about the Islamic faith created concern about whether President Trump would treat all Americans—including immigrants—fairly" (55). Davis and Frey offer readers a relatively more complete and nuanced entry for each president, even Trump.

However, as demonstrated by Kate Messner and Adam Rex's The Next President (2020), it is possible to recognize presidential accomplishments while demonstrating honesty and respect for young readers by providing them access to America's complex history. The Next President chronicles presidential childhoods within the context of whomever was president the year they were born. With Washington, Messner reminds readers that when he was president, nine future presidents already were born. The book opens with a double spread of a diverse group of people looking at various presidential portraits. In the bottom right corner, near a box that reads, "And some [children] don't have a clue yet that one day, they'll be president," is a child asleep in a stroller, which establishes a common theme of the book (6–7). The text then provides brief profiles of each president in conversation with future presidents who were children at the time, often including the less flattering aspects of some presidential biographies. Of Adams, Messner writes, "He was the only one of the first five presidents who didn't enslave people," and of Jefferson, "he had written the Declaration of Independence, which includes the words 'all men are created equal'—even though Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people on his Virginia plantation" (9). Unlike So You Want To Be President?, The Next President beneficially includes both horrors and achievements. The opening pages celebrate the military, intellectual, and political achievements of early presidents, as well as include illustrations in the fore- and background of enslaved Africans holding in their arms many iconic structures (see fig. 2). The book acknowledges not only that enslaved people were denied equality, liberty, and happiness by many of the Founding Fathers, but also that they were directly responsible for much of the success of America's colonial history. Rex also includes images of Black artists painting a portrait of Washington, thereby depicting African Americans as painters, builders, and presidents. Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump are all included on the penultimate page. Rex locates Trump in the bottom right corner, surrounded by the blue of Obama's mother's clothes and holding a model airplane. The caption suggestively reads, "And President 45, Donald Trump, was a teenager [in 1961]. He was attending New York Military Academy, where his father had hoped he'd learn some discipline" (33).⁹ As opposed to Bill Clinton, "who loved debate and played tenor saxophone," George W. Bush, who "signed up for the cheerleading squad," or Obama, who "would grow up to be the first African American president," Trump is merely remembered as having once had the opportunity to practice responsible behavior (see fig. 3).

The book concludes with an apparent repudiation of Trump, appearing to skip his portrait after Obama and move straight to the, as of the time of the book's publication, blank space for #46. Instead of Trump's portrait in line with other presidents, the readers see one of

Fig 2.

From The Next President © 2020 Kate Messner. Illustrations by Adam Rex. Used with Permission from Chronicle Books, LLC.

Fig 3.

From The Next President © 2020 Kate Messner. Illustrations by Adam Rex. Used with Permission from Chronicle Books, LLC.

Hillary Clinton on an adjacent wall. A confident girl looks at Clinton near a caption that reads, "And where is the next president now?" (34). The text poses this question to the girl, and presumably to child readers, while the illustrations of Americans walking through the gallery, which bookend the book, imbue the book with diversity and hope that readers' perspective on American history as well as their compassion will grow. The book ends with honesty and hope:

The truth is America's earliest presidents weren't all that different from one another. Most were wealthy, white, Protestant men who might have been surprised if they'd been around to see a Catholic or an African American man elected president … or a woman nominated by a major party for the highest office in the land. … When voters choose the next president, they won't look to the past, but to the future—and the ever-hopeful vision of what America could be.

(34)

The Next President creatively acknowledges that though there is some interesting, albeit mostly inconsequential, variety in presidential childhoods, there remains a dearth of diversity in terms race, gender, and class. The text and illustrations work together to put forth a "hopeful vision" of what America could become (34). In so doing, the book not only subverts conventional books such as So You Want to Be President? that limit the celebration of diversity to hobbies and height differences, but also resists the tendency to omit references to early presidents as enslavers, perhaps paving the way for future educational biographies to take seriously the importance of child readers receiving truthful and complete depictions of American presidents. Yet, as we will see in the next section, while there do exist a few thoughtful, honest, and accurate reflections on presidential history in the market, such texts compete with POD texts, whose accessibility has been expedited in recent years.

Print on Demand Books and Pamphlet Culture

Although many of the abovementioned educational textbooks generate traditional, limiting, and uncomplicated depictions of Trump under the guise of political neutrality, since 2016 there has emerged a sub-genre of propagandistic texts aimed solely at subverting what their authors consider a bias within the world of children's literature publishing. The POD texts I undertake in this section utilize a cheap, easily disseminated format to reach the intended audience. Children's literature has long been a place for authors to sketch out their political agendas, as children are so often looked at as the future and children's literature as harmless. Children's literature can be used as a tool for partisan recruitment, and collectively, these texts reflect such an attempt. In other words, they speak to how Trump's administration, speeches, and Twitter account have purposefully misled young Americans by creating a subjective narrative for this celebrity-turned-populist. So normal are his ideas, these books indirectly argue, that they can appear unproblematically in children's literature. Further, even in the digital age, when Twitter and cable news have coarsened thoughtful political discourse, there remains a cultural attitude that print culture is more legitimate than other media. Hence, POD texts, made especially accessible to Americans by Amazon Prime, Amazon Kindles, and Amazon's own POD services, are influencing children's literature publication. Although it is impossible to know for certain how commercially successful these POD texts are, they garner hundreds of Amazon reviews, some of their authors have written multiple texts, some have been featured on Fox News, and some have obtained a level of celebrity amongst right-wing supporters. Thus, since the influence of such texts cannot be measured by conventional measures (i.e., number of units sold or the reputation of the author or publisher), it is helpful to see these texts as a revival of a once effective means of subversive political commentary: the pamphlet.

As Joad Raymond explains, "in its late sixteenth-century usage, the word pamphlet was deprecatory. Pamphlets were small, insignificant, ephemeral, disposable, untrustworthy, unruly, noisy, deceitful, poorly printed, addictive, a waste of time" (10). Further, they were "closely associated with slander or scurrility" (8). Nevertheless, they were powerful forms of propaganda that fueled enormous amounts of religious change in early modern England. During its heyday in early modern Britain, the pamphlet appeared amongst respectable works, just as today's POD propaganda is now equally represented on Amazon with books from credible publishers (as well as more literary POD titles). Akin to early modern pamphlets, political POD books are cheaply made and as cheaply sold, likely with the intention of easy and quick dissemination. The approximately 150 million Americans with Prime memberships are granted free digital access to these books, as well as free shipping and handling of physical copies. The etymology of pamphlet reflects the ideological position of these texts, in that pan suggests all I love, or a thing loved by all persons (Raymond 7). POD can easily be understood as bringing forth into a new century a previously defunct form of political discourse. An awareness of how early modern pamphleteers used their medium to bring about change and often purposefully mislead reveals the influential power of POD books in children's literature. In other words, these texts should be taken seriously.

For example, What Is MAGA? (2018) claims to be the first in a "series of picture books created by U.S. Army Iraq Veteran/Writer Illustrator, SGT Crowley … that celebrate the AMAZING Political Movement of 'Make America Great Again,' that swept over America During [sic] the 2016 Presidential Election." In other words, Crowley markets his military experience as his authority as a children's book author and political commentator, yet his bio fails to reference what Crowley is best known for: his 2009 racial profiling arrest of public intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who was attempting to enter his own residence. This arrest led then President Obama to invite Crowley and Gates to the White House for what social media and cable news inanely termed "Beer Summit." The book simplistically explains that in previous decades, America won great wars, and everyone was free, until "greedy politicians" closed the factories and stole the money from the working class. Thankfully, the narrative continues, a great businessman—represented in a Trump caricature with Superman-like features, overlooking Manhattan with a large, red tie flapping in the wind—saved the country through his selfless love: "'The Main Stream Media' [sic] bullied him, but he never allowed himself to back down, and the popularity of his rallies proved the love between Trump, the people, and the country." Just as Crowley fails to mention the arrest that made him a right-wing darling, so does his book fail to include any of the controversies surrounding Trump. Most surprising, however, is that Crowley also never mentions any of Trump's politics or policies. He never even quotes Trump. Rather, the book merely summarizes common Conservative talking points with Trump touted as a superhero. As but one example, one page claims that coal miners, steel workers, and veterans are all happy with Trump, but it does not discuss why or include any Trump policy that benefits such demographics.

Much is the same in other POD books: an enormous simplification of the issues; a fundamentally incomplete portrayal of Trump; his depiction as a lone savior; a celebration of his mocking insults; derision towards Democrats and Republicans; and a steady obsession with celebrities' opinions of Trump. David Ian Young's A Book for Children about Donald Trump (2017) employs Seussian rhyme to explain the 2016 election to young readers, again constructing Trump as a superhero who overcomes enormous obstacles over celebrities, career politicians, and fake media. This decision to mimic Seuss is especially telling as a common technique used by authors, whatever their political purposes. As Philip Nel explains of political books copying Seuss's style, "in the public imagination, Seussian rhyme has become a popular mode for social commentary," and Seuss's poetry has been used as "a medium of dissent" (170). Seeming Seussian validates the author's ideas, given Seuss's immense popularity since the 1950s. Young does include some of the controversy surrounding Trump's campaign, such as the Access Hollywood video in which Trump was recorded explaining how women enjoyed being groped, but downplays Trump's defense of sexual assault, using Seuss's well-known anapestic rhythm to playfully insist America is more important than old videos.¹⁰ Taffy Jensen's Mommy, Who Is Donald J. Trump? (2017) celebrates Trump's businesses, calling him "straightforward" (9), "cautious about spending money" (12), and a supporter of "strong borders" (13). Dr. Winnie's I Am President Donald J. Trump and I Love AMERICA has as its front cover the photograph of Trump hugging the American flag at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2020 and uses the first person to list successes ("I started many businesses," "I won the election with 304 electoral college votes," "I love America's babies," "I love that America is a nation with many Christians"), all of which ultimately suggests to readers a lone, exclusive manifestation of patriotism.

Make Children's Books Great Again (2018), written under the especially creative pen name B. Conservative, stands apart from these other POD books in that it actually engages with issues. Once again applying Seussian meter, this writer tells the story of Billy (an anthropomorphized male elephant dressed in a familiar navy suit, a red tie, and a red hat) who with each page explains to Suzie (an anthropomorphized female donkey with colorful braids in her hair) how only Conservatives love the Constitution and value freedom. Here is one representative example regarding mandated public schooling:

And everyone suffers there, including poor Suzie… … … … … … … … … … … … … . … .Teachers jaded by tenure just don't seem to careAnd with meager materials, every student must share… … … … … … … … … … … … … . … .For Billy there are both public and charter schoolsWhere people are able to get all the right tools¹¹

The simplification of the issues is apparent: the purpose of public education, the problems that need to be addressed, the superiority of problem-free charter schools, and a profound misunderstanding of tenure. Less apparent in the verse alone is how gender, and possibly race, are coded. Apart from one schoolteacher and one of her students, all the elephants (i.e., the Conservatives) in the text are male. By comparison, in addition to Suzie, most of the donkeys are female, the exception being the male donkey physician and one of his patients. Thus, everything the book considers strong is associated with masculinity, while everything that is negative is associated with femininity. The narrative follows Billy's lifelong devotion to Conservatism, which results in his successful business, health, and happiness. By comparison, when readers last see Suzie, she is single with two children, holding a "welfare" check, still refusing to "value freedom." She is surrounded by donkeys wearing worn-out clothes with empty pockets and holding tin cans, begging for Billy's money.

Akin to early modern pamphleteer culture, these books attempt to legitimize themselves by doing what they can to look like real books. Mommy, Who Is Donald J. Trump? claims on its front cover to be "The Amazon bestseller, from the #1 bestselling author of Meet the Trumps!, and Make Children's Books Great Again." It includes a gold circle with the image of a bald eagle and the words "Children's Liberty Press." No such press exists. The image is merely meant to superficially capitalize on the word "liberty" and with it suggest that the text is award-winning. As Kenneth B. Kidd and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. write of prizing children's literature, "prizing has been a remarkably effective mechanism for publicity, sales, and scandal, if not also for the production of 'literature,' in the form of instant, modern classics" (3). This attempt to look like an award-winning children's book participates in the enormous spread of disinformation normalized during the Trump era, from his insistence that it did not rain during his inauguration to his statements that COVID-19 was under control, that windmill noise causes cancer, that he was once awarded Michigan's Man of the Year award, and that he won the 2020 election, to name a very few. Such dishonesty spills into these POD books, even to the point that some authors create awards for themselves to propound their legitimacy.

While so many of the different right-leaning titles come from POD services, this popularity is not to suggest that similarly themed books have not found their way into more traditional forms of publishing. For instance, Kash Patel, a former member of Trump's cabinet, partnered with Donald Trump, Jr., and Brave Books to publish The Plot against the King (2022), the story of Hillary Queenton who spreads lies that King Donald worked with the Russionians to become king. Likewise, conservative pundit and New York Times best-selling author Eric Metax created the series "Donald the Caveman," published by Regnery and currently comprised of Donald Drains the Swamp (2019), Donald Builds the Wall (2019), and Donald and the Fake News (2020).¹² As indicated by these three titles, a hero-like caveman, costumed in an American flag and donning a large, blond comb-over, saves his people from swamp creatures, neighboring enemies, and misinformation. The books include caricatures of the typical far-right targets (George W. Bush, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) in its attempt at satire. In both cases, these texts exemplify what Michelle Ann Abate identifies as a group of far-right books that "formerly [would] have been considered a specialized minority faction [but now have] become firmly implanted in mass culture," fueling the normalization of populism (25).

As discussed in the previous section, glamorizing presidents is commonplace in America, but the popularity of these overtly political POD books signals an expansion of such cultural tendencies outside of mainstream publishing. And that expansion goes in multiple directions. Though less common, there are left-leaning POD texts as well. Todd Eisner and Jamie Barrett's The Pumpkin and the Pantsuit (2017) specifically addresses Trump's bullying tendencies (discussed in detail below) while also hoping to answer the question proposed on its the back cover: "How do I explain this election to my children?" This non-profit, left-leaning POD book imagines Trump as a pumpkin and Hillary Clinton as a pantsuit, each campaigning to be the "boss" of the "big white house." Eisner explains how the intelligent and experienced Pantsuit could lose to the inexperienced Pumpkin. Though disappointed and shocked by the election, the narrator concludes with a message of hope: "Turns out, she had inspired the little pantsuits to believe that someday, very soon, one of them would live in the big white house!" However, the progressive, anti-bullying message might be lost both when the author and illustrator unnecessarily lampoon Trump's skin complexion and when all the women and girls in the book are depicted as pantsuits and little pantsuits. But just as in their counterparts in early modern pamphlet culture, POD books often contain disparaging language, whatever their political leaning.

That said, we can and should recognize these children's books as a structural part of the current right-wing ecosystem. They have a firm place in the culture of America First Policies, and they help to promote the MAGA-led tribalism that has become normalized since 2016. Though less prestigious than the other books discussed in this project, they are as effective at (mis)communicating as Twitter or Reddit. The physical design of the books, their misleading use of award stickers, and most importantly, the pamphleteering-like way Amazon eases the dissemination of these texts while making them appear reliable, or at least vetted, reflects America's own contemporary inability to separate truth from fiction. Given the enormous influence of pamphleteer culture in early modern England, it behooves scholars and publishers to take seriously the spread of such similarly dispersed texts—and to resist.

Trump as Presidential Villain

Whereas Trump's presence in informational books heightens the perceived difficulties writers struggle with when depicting his presidency, and those writers who support Trump have turned to short, cheap, vernacular POD formats offered by Amazon to reach young readers, Trump has also begun to surface in a third form within children's literature: a bully. In this final section, I consider Trump's rise to political power within the context of national discussions about bullying, a form of subjugation long addressed in children's literature. Just as America was addressing bullying via legislation, Trump's campaign turned that initiative into an effective paradigm for procuring and maintaining political influence. Educational biographies elide Trump's intimidation tactics, choosing instead to focus on Trump's business, while numerous picture books and novels offer a much more informed depiction of Trump's behavior and policies through their frequent depiction of him as a villain.

Many of the Trump-supporting and Trump-mythologizing POD books celebrate his victory in 2016 while paying little or no attention to the controversial details of the election. Yet within a year of the 2016 election, children's books did begin to address Trump's vitriolic campaign tactics. Maya Gonzalez's When a Bully Is President: Truth and Creativity for Oppressive Times (2017), for example, never names Trump but clearly evokes the then sitting president with its title. Such an unlikely association of an American president with bullying continues an anti-bullying thread commonly found in children's literature. School bullying has come to prominent national attention in the twenty-first century, and while anti-bullying agendas are found in some of children's literature's oldest novels, such as Tom Brown's School Days (1857), only in 2015 did all 50 states enact anti-bullying laws in schools. These recent legislative actions, when juxtaposed with Trump's campaign, presidency, and personality, help to explain why it has become somewhat common to find picture books with bullies suggestive of Trump. For instance, in Virginia Sobol and Sarah Daly's Time Out, Donald! (2018), a caricature of young Donald Trump "gets put into time out almost every day at preschool." Each subsequent page depicts Donald bullying his classmates by name calling, theft, refusing to pick up his toys, ridiculing those who accidentally fall on the playground, and so on. After each episode, the narrator asks readers to consider what they would do if put in the same position. The book is dedicated to "children who treat others with kindness, respect and generosity." That a sitting president is positioned as the bullying antagonist—especially in the immediate wake of anti-bullying legislation and social movements—is shocking.

While Time Out, Donald! playfully shames its main character for his mean-spirited antics, Kerascoët's I Walk with Vanessa (2018) is a wordless picture book that focuses on the victims of bullies like Donald, as well as the strength of empathy. Vanessa is bullied on her first day of school by a boy with blond hair and a unibrow. In the illustration where he is most vicious, he is encircled in a watercolor splash of red, which—in a book otherwise composed of white or soft blue backgrounds—reinforces the boy's red striped shirt, his Trump-like aggression towards women, and the color of Trump's tie and political party.

In Harry Bliss's Grace for Gus (2018), Trump again is depicted antagonistically as a predator. After saying goodnight to her fathers, Grace sneaks out of her Manhattan apartment and spends her night raising money for the class hamster by drawing caricatures, playing the violin, and dancing as a street performer. In one image, as she descends into the subway, readers see the name of "Rump Tower" in the background, a playful jab at Trump's narcissistic need to place his name on everything. Throughout her evening, Grace encounters several figures, such as Spike Lee, Vincent van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, Alfred E. Newman, Andy Warhol, Alfred Hitchcock, Alison Bechdel, and Robert Crump. In the subway, readers see Trump frowning under a Tax Relief sign. Grace dances with one of the stanchions, and in the next image, Bliss depicts a crowd clapping in appreciation, with Trump giving a thumb's up. Though outwardly a likable depiction of Trump, the dramatic irony of his giving a thumb's up to a young girl dancing on a pole is not missed.

In addition to books depicting Trump as a bully or predator, some texts address his aggressive capitalism. In Joshua Siegal and Amélie Falière's Morris Wants More (2017), the Trump-like caricature Morris "lives in a HUMONGOUS house, with lots and lots of toys" (see fig. 4). Further, Morris is depicted in a dark suit and red tie, with a button on his chest with either the letter "P," suggesting "President," or the letter "D," suggesting "Donald." The narrative follows the various gifts the spoiled, short-tempered Morris receives in the days leading to Christmas, noting that "Morris's parents get/him anything he wants," though each day he is unsatisfied by the size of the gift and demands a larger one. On the first day, he "only got a little present," followed by a "medium-sized present," then a "Big" one, then a "Huge" one, and so on. With each gift, Morris complains it is not "Big" or "Huge" or "Mega" enough. Finally, on the twelfth day of Christmas, Morris receives a "SUPERMEGA MONSTERMASSIVE present," only to be "squashed" by his own greed. The passionate Amazon reviews of Morris Wants More speak to the political potential of children's literature. C. E. Wilson calls it the "feel-good story of the year," while Amanda R. laments, missing the cautionary tale of greed, that there is "no real story": "This is just a book to teach your kid 12 different words for 'big' [and] illustrating the main character as 'Trump,' is a cheap way to sell books to fools. Can't we keep politics out of a kids [sic] book? Come on now."

However, while Amanda R. is correct—the words do lampoon Trump's rhetoric and the narrative is quite simple—Morris Wants More participates in a popular subgenre of children's books aimed at illuminating the unchecked corporate greed that exists during the holidays. As previously discussed, Trump's first appearance in a children's

Fig 4.

From Morris Wants More © Flying Eye Books, © Joshua Siegal, Amèlie Faliére, 2017

book, Christmas in July (1992), is also set during the holidays. Likewise, perhaps the oldest secular holiday story, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), addresses the negative impact of greed, as do How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957) and A Coyote Solstice Tale (2009) as well as non-holiday books, such as The Lorax (1971) and the Caldecott Honor Click, Clack Moo: Cows That Type (2000), among many others. What is remarkable about Morris Wants More is less that it is an anti-capitalist children's book addressing the hypocrisy of corporate greed and its adulteration of the holidays, and more that the book places a sitting president as the Scrooge/Grinch/Once-Ler/Farmer Brown-like villain, though in this case, there is no ensuing epiphany.

Books challenging capitalism and bullying are not new to children's literature. However, Trump's presidency might be entirely responsible for creating a new subgenre of political texts for children: wall books. While other presidents are responsible for much of the wall found along America's southern border, about 450 miles were built or reinforced during Trump's administration, and it became a defining issue for his campaign and presidency. Now, it frequently surfaces in children's books, to the extent that several books for children engage with Executive Order 13767 and its negative impact on diplomacy and the environment.¹³ For instance, Sophie Siers and Anne Villeneuve's Dear Donald Trump (2018) narrates the story of Sam, who finds inspiration in and then seeks advice from Donald Trump when the boy decides to build a wall in his bedroom, supposedly to isolate himself from his older brother. Brad Holdgrafer and Jay Cover's Walls (2018) uses congenial rhyme and minimalistic marker drawing as it follows a mouse who learns of a variety of ways walls positively help people, such as to enclose domesticated pets and play racquetball. "But then there are walls/that cast shadows over all," the narrator suggests, as the book transitions to a consideration of how large walls can be devastating between neighbors. The narrator continues: "[Walls] keep out the people/we'd like to meet,/or who'd like to meet us,/if it weren't for concrete!" The cover juxtaposes this quatrain with an image of one person on the left side of a grey wall extending imaginatively beyond the page barriers and three people and the mouse on the right side of the cold barrier. Everyone is sad, because such walls are "unfriendly," "rude," and "bad": "They block new adventures/with their bad attitudes." Therefore, the narrator encourages young readers to break down the "big, boring walls …/so exciting new friends can start to come 'round."

The potential for new, diverse friends in a similar context surfaces in Alexandra Penfold and Suzanne Kauffman's All Are Welcome (2018). which addresses both Executive Order 13767 (the wall construction at the American southern border) and Executive Order 13769 (the Muslim travel ban) by repeating the following refrain throughout its depiction of a day at school:

Pencils are sharpened in their case.Bells are ringing, let's make haste.Schools beginning, dream to chase.All are welcome here.… … … … … … … … … …We are part of a communityOur strength is our diversityA shelter from adversityAll are welcome here.

The book ends with a foldout and one final declaration, "You have a space here./All are welcome here" (emphasis in original), with a realistic depiction of the diversity that makes up America's people. Jon Agee's The Wall in the Middle of the Book (2018) begins with the image of a brick wall drawn down the gutter, an image repeated throughout the book. Agee follows a young boy knight, detailing his obnoxious and misguided notion that "it's a good thing" there is a "wall in the middle of the book," since the "wall protects this side of the book …/from the other side of the book." Agee's decision to give the book a medieval look with knights and ogres speaks to the dated and naïve approach of Trump's politics toward border security. As the book progresses, the boy grows increasingly concerned about what is on the other side, including his foolish belief that "the most dangerous thing on the other side of the book is the ogre." However, as the naïve knight stands on a ladder to complete his wall, he quickly becomes so consumed by his foolish ideas that he fails to see the flood and scary crocodile behind him on his side of the wall. Eventually, the ogre from the other side saves him, informs him that the other side of the book is safe, and offers to show him around. All the while, the now-flooded left side of the wall includes a series of pictures of increasingly larger fish eating smaller fish, suggesting the dangers of unchecked capitalism.

In The Wall: A Timeless Tale (2019), Giancarlo Macrì and Carolina Zanotti depict an angry king leaving his castle for the first time in years, only to notice that his kingdom has become more diverse.¹⁴ Every page is a double spread, composed mostly of roundish, fingerprint-sized splotches in rainbow colors that signify the kingdom's diversity. Early on, the king asks, "How did so many different people end up in my kingdom?" to which his assistant replies, "[I]t's been a long time since you left your castle. All of these people live here now." The king orders the construction of a wall to separate himself from those people who "don't look like him" and "don't want to leave." In the middle third of the book, the wall is depicted as a three-dimensional, rectangular piece of paper in the book's gutter. After the wall is completed, all color in the double spreads is segregated to the left page, and only the blue people who look like the king are on the right side of the wall. Eventually, the king allows some of the multicolored refugees to return because of his need for gardeners, fountain builders, engineers, sculptures, astronomers, singers, and dancers (see fig. 5). Although an array of occupations is invited to return, that the king begins with builders and gardeners and ends with singers and dancers is problematic and risks overshadowing the otherwise "valuable story of a kingdom that's better together," as promoted by the back cover. In the final spoken words, the king states, "How nice to see so many talented people in our kingdom," yet this conclusion is somewhat subverted by the reason the king permits their return: to work for and entertain him.

Fig 5.

From The Wall: A Timeless Tale © 2019 Giancarlo Macrí and Carolina Zanotti. Illustrations by Mauro Sacco and Elisa Vallarino.

As previously discussed, a common—and often misleading—thread running throughout both the right-leaning and left-leaning nonfictional texts is Trump's business success, and creative works also address this same topic. For example, Laura Ruby's fantasy novel York: The Shadow Cipher (2017), set in the late eighteenth century, has as its villain a New York real estate mogul who, although mostly in the background of the narrative, dates models and evicts tenants from recently purchased buildings. The plot follows two of these tenants who work to save the neighborhood from the fraudulent magnate. Much more prominently depicted is the villain in Newbery winner Susan Cooper's The Boggart Fights Back (2018), which portrays the damages of unchecked development on both local communities and the environment. The third in a series, The Boggart Fights Back is magical realism that draws heavily from European folklore. While the two previous novels contain monsters such as an Old Thing, the Blue Men, the Nuckelavee, the shape shifting Boggart, and his cousin Nessie of Loch Ness, the true monster of the third installment is the American real estate developer William Trout, who generally "wore his trademark black Trout jacket with the bold yellow T on its back," but changes costumes when he flies to Scotland to break ground on a new hotel: "Mr. Trout was dressed very formally … in a dark suit, white shirt, and red tie" (201).¹⁵ With Trout as the Trump stand-in, the narrative establishes the central conflict: that the development of the Trout Castle Resort on the unspoiled loch in Scotland will be debilitating for the local economy (since tourists will mostly spend money inside the resort) as well as the environment (since it will eliminate a local seal population). The concerns reflect the impacts of the border wall Trump significantly expanded, such as exacerbating flooding, blocking migration patterns of many animals, destroying diverse ecosystems when new roads were built, and disrupting national parks. Cooper's novel is in conversation with many of these concerns, as when the grandfather of Allie and Jay (the sibling protagonists of the novel) initiate an anti-Trout petition:

It was a plea to the local council, asking that for environmental reasons, they should prevent William Trout from building his lavish Trout Castle Resort on the peaceful shore of Loch Linnhe. It quoted scientific studies of polluted caves and vanished wildlife, it warned of peril to small aging roads and bridges, it showed proof that Trout resorts in other places had promised local jobs and then brought in their own employees instead.

(96)

When asked at a press conference if he has considered the environmental impact, Trout looks at the reporter with "dislike" and responds, "'It's going to be environmentally perfect. … I've built resorts all over the world, and I've had many, many environmental awards'" (38). Despite enormous resistance, Trout continues with his project, since, as he explains, "Nobody, nothing frightens William Trout—he's in control. He's the boss" (186).

Although the novel focuses mostly on Trout's abrasive attitude, disregard for the local press, and lack of concern over his environmental impact, it also considers some of the human rights ethics that emerge from such construction. Trout's resort is not aimed at blocking people from entering the loch, but the natives to the loch—Nuckelavee, the Boggart, Nessie, and the seals—rightfully recognize Trout as a threat to their native home. The comical climax of the novel occurs when these creatures attack Trout, who falls into the loch and comes face to face with those whom his construction most harms. They toss Trout in the air, slap him around with their tails, and terrify him with their growls before letting him go. Embarrassed and terrified by his run-in with the loch's occupants, Trout has his entourage promise never to share with the press what happened, and in his final press conference, he changes his narrative completely, stating that it is because of the indigenous species living in the area that he will build elsewhere (202). Of course, Trout cares nothing about the environment. He only wishes to avoid another embarrassment. Readers see Trout's narrative change throughout the novel, just as Trump's narrative about the wall—Americans need a wall, Americans want a wall, Mexico will pay for the wall, it will be built in two years, of course Americans will pay for it, I only ever intended to partly build it, and so on—changed as needed.

Never has a president been so frequently depicted as a villain, yet never has a sitting president so consistently and so publicly acted the part. Despite being elected at the same time America collectively was admonishing school and cyberbullying—both of which play a significant part in mass shootings and youth suicides—Trump consistently fashioned himself as a bully, as captured by many of these books. This bullying demeanor fueled his relationships with reporters, women, cabinet members, ambassadors, national leaders, and even children, as when he told Greta Thunberg, at the time a 16-year climate change activist who identifies on the autism spectrum, that she should "Chill" and find ways to deal with her "anger management issues" (qtd. in Smith). Whereas nonfictional texts marketed as biographies have touted Trump as a successful businessman, picture books and novels offer a more complete, and certainly more nuanced, aspect of Trump's business practices, policies, and behavior.¹⁶

Conclusion

In 2010, Michelle Ann Abate offered the following sentences by way of her conclusion to Raising Your Kids Right: Children's Literature and American Political Conservatism: "[T]he political influence and social impact of [the conservative texts discussed in her book] ultimately remains to be told. Only future elections will reveal the comparative success or relative failure of messages contained in [these texts] for kids on the next generation of U.S. citizens, voters, and policy-makers" (188). Those presidential elections since 2010, as well as those in the foreseeable future, confirm the successes not only of those books Abate discusses but also those books considered here. America currently finds itself ensnared in a battle of ideas, and children's literature is a conducive part of the strategy for the entire political spectrum—so much so that during the second decade of the 21^st century, scholars of children's literature routinely interrogated the political and ideological possibilities of children's literature, with edited collections of radical children's literature, award-winning monographs on progressive and conservative politics, forums, roundtables, articles, and special journal issues, while often self-describing such scholarly work as manifestos. And during that time, Donald Trump became president.

Trump's place in children's literature is complex. The mythologization of American presidents in educational texts perseveres, while at the same time, his presence takes political children's literature and the publishing industry into new directions. He appears where we expect him: both in reputedly unbiased, informational books that promote his strengths as a successful businessperson as well as in those books aiming to win new converts. At the same time, Trump's campaign and presidency have inspired new sub-genres, such as wall books, while also placing him front and center in the well-known narratives of children's literature, such as anti-bullying books and books about empathetic acceptance. In such cases, these books collectively cast him as a new type of villain characterized by bullying, greed, deception, sexism, xenophobia, and racism, with his recognizable hairstyle, navy suit, and red tie functioning as costume. Likewise, he has fueled the expansion of how mis- and disinformation spreads via POD books that offer a cheap opportunity to misinform young readers in the same lucrative ways as early modern pamphlets.

To survey approximately three dozen books about Trump is to survey the cultural divide in contemporary America, where through children's literature young citizens are inundated by texts mythologizing, villainizing, and supporting the forty-fifth president. Several of these books express visions of a country more sanguine and far more democratic than what currently exists, while many others—some educational and some POD—normalize Trump in an attempt to foster partisan support. The messy result is dozens of children's books about, at least as of this writing, a one-term president who failed to capture the popular vote, yet whose influence saturates American culture as he begins another presidential campaign.

I drafted a blueprint for this essay on the evening of January 6, 2021, after watching news coverage of the attack on the U.S. Capital Building. Much of what I emotionally wrote on that day has long since been removed, yet in the two years since, there has been an absolute inundation of children's books akin to the POD texts I have discussed, many of which now come amid a conservative backlash against books focused on equity, particularly in terms of gender identity and race. As I conclude, multiple states with Republican-majority legislatures and governors have in recent months passed legislation that censors education, not to mention the Parents' Bill of Rights Act of 2021. While such censorship in schools is hardly groundbreaking (i.e., the Scopes trial in 1925), with the removal of such texts from schools, there also has surfaced, as but one example, book series such as "Heroes of Liberty." Emanating in the wake of the so-called cancelling of Dr. Seuss, editor and board member Bethany Mandel guilefully told Fox Business that they were aiming to provide "high-quality books that teach good moral lessons without political sermonizing." To date, this presumed apolitical series includes books on Amy Coney Barrett, Rush Limbaugh, Ronald Reagan, Elon Musk, John Wayne, and Margaret Thatcher, as well as somewhat surprising volumes on Harriet Tubman and Alexander Hamilton. As scholars, we must be attuned to such complexity as we debate the responsibility that adults perchance have towards working with future generations so that with them, we can understand more.