“Once upon a time, in the Land of the Free, there lived a wizard called Kash the Distinguished Discoverer.” So begins “The Plot Against the King,” written by FBI Director Kash Patel. All the core elements of a fairy tale are present, in word and image, but it is also immediately clear that the story cleaves closely not just to tropes that are deeply embedded in the literary canon, but also to the political present.
Kash Patel is a lawyer who first came into the political spotlight when he was appointed a senior counsel to the House Intelligence Committee in 2017, becoming known as an outspoken critic of the FBI’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election (the so-called “Russiagate” affair). His criticism of the agency grew into an obsession, and in 2023 he published “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy,” which details what he views as the hidden power structures in America. Numerous fact-checkers disagree, but criticisms haven’t stopped Patel on his mission to expose the “truth” — and not just to those who have the power to act now. He has written three picture books for children, all with the same core messages.
The cover of “The Plot Against the King” signals Patel’s intentions — to the adult reading it out loud, if not to the child listening. The king in question, triumphantly wielding a scepter and sporting a crown, an ermine-trimmed cloak and a medallion over his medieval-type clothes, is undoubtedly Donald Trump. Looming over him ominously is a barely disguised Hillary Clinton, frowning. The wizard behind him, with a glowing orb atop his staff, is the author himself.
And so the adults know what is coming. Trump is the king, and he triumphs in the end over his evil adversaries, Hillary Queenton and her supporters, who use underhanded ruses to try and swing the outcome on “Choosing Day.” Indeed, it is a very lightly fictionalized version of Patel’s interpretation of the 2016 election, when he demonstrated his loyalty to Trump by opposing the investigation into Russian interference. The book was published in 2022, along with the second in the series, “The Plot Against the King: 2,000 Mules,” which rehearses the story of the “stolen” 2020 election (“mules” was the word used at the time for those suspected of stuffing ballot boxes with illicit voting cards). Both books are structured as a quest — brave individuals fight against the current to uncover the truth, with the help of Wizard Kash. These tales were joined in September 2024 by “The Plot Against the King 3: The Return of the King,” Patel’s retelling of Trump’s third election. The strong Tolkien echoes of the title were no doubt intended, the outcome prejudged by Patel.
These books could be — and have been — judged as MAGA conspiracy theories, but that’s not the interesting thing about them: Taking a closer look rather than dismissing them as propaganda reveals a wealth of information about Patel’s motivations and the values underpinning the MAGA movement. These books tell a story about the morality that lies at the heart of Patel’s vision for Trump’s America, and reveal another aspect of the moral framing: the grandiosity that stems from the belief you are on a quest of historical and existential significance. The very fact that these books are aimed at children as young as 3 speaks to the long historical arc Patel intends to influence. He is on a mission to save America, now and for decades to come.
The opening pages of the first book in the series detail Wizard Kash’s exploits, rescuing princesses and defeating trolls, ogres and dragons. The fact that “Kash was known far and wide as the one person who could discover anything about anything” (the grandiosity and self-confidence Patel brings to his version of events are evident from the start) made him the ideal person for Duke Devin to approach with misgivings about the heralds, whose news was spreading across the kingdom. King Donald, they claimed, was cheating his way to the throne with the help of “Russionia.” If the real-world people are not evident from their names, the nonfiction afterword spells it out. The Duke is Devin Nunes, the Republican member of Congress who served as chair of the House Intelligence Committee from 2015 until 2019, during the Russiagate investigation. He became CEO of Truth Social in 2022 and was appointed by Trump to chair the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board in 2025.
The news in Patel’s book was being spread by a “shifty knight” — referring to Adam Schiff, who served as a Democratic member of Congress from 2001 until 2024 and as the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, including during the period when it was looking into Trump’s potential collusion with Russia during the 2016 election. In 2017, Trump took to Twitter to call him “Sleazy Adam Schiff, the totally biased Congressman looking into ‘Russia’” and labeled the investigation “the Dem loss excuse.” With his “little shifty Schiff” dig at Schiff’s size, many saw antisemitism: “When discussing Jews,” Peter Beinart noted at the time, “Trump often plays on well-worn caricatures about cleverness, deviousness and physical weakness.” In Patel’s version, the shifty knight claims to have “evidence” that King Donald cheated with the help of “Russionia,” but “loyal” Duke Devin just cannot believe it.
Together, Wizard Kash and Duke Devin follow the slimy trail of slugs (a reference to Clinton’s email trail, perhaps?), finding out that Hillary Queenton herself secretly instructed “Keeper Komey” (James Comey, head of the FBI at the time) to investigate. Kash and Duke Devin head to “Russionia” itself to find that the “Swirly Tower Tavern” of the rumors doesn’t even exist. The scheming opposition is exposed, and Choosing Day — when the people choose, freely, between Hillary Queenton and King Donald — is saved.
The three books have two different illustrators, but they share an aesthetic: All three have bright, appealing illustrations with plenty of detail and movement to match the best children’s picture books. The looks on the faces of the characters tell whole stories in themselves — the sleepiness of Joe Biden’s character, variously called king or Baron Von Biden or just “poor Joe,” the crafty look of the shifty knight and the haughtiness of Hillary Queenton. But it’s not just the main cast. Each page has had serious attention, seen in the artist’s inventiveness around the minor characters: the fear of the princess rescued by Wizard Kash from the smoke-breathing dragon, the joy of the jousting knights, the confidence of the heralds spreading the news, the confusion on the faces of the crowds.
This same attention has been paid to the language, in this first book at least. There are wonderful phrases, again in the best tradition of writing for children: “‘Kash!’ said the distressed duke. ‘I am distressed. I know these terrible, tragical, tangle-full rumors cannot be true.’” While on the “Quest for the Truth about the Plot against the King” (italics and capitals in the original, at the start of the quest, signaling the historical importance of the job), Kash and the duke “looked around all the corners and in all the cracks.” The heralds, meanwhile, “moved on to more exciting tales, declaring the sun was made of mustard and would soon drip down and make everything yellow and mustardy.”
The last example suggests what is more obvious elsewhere: the clear instructional nature of the books for the young reader about the world. In this quote, the heralds are not to be trusted, a constant theme of all three books, and climate change is not real, but invented by these untrustworthy reporters. Once Wizard Kash and Duke Devin have discovered the “truth,” Kash tells the crowds: “It’s time for you to think carefully. … Don’t just trust the person with the loudest trumpet.”
This didacticism spills over far more clearly in other places, to the detriment of the language. This need to communicate real political realities creates a tension in all three books that drags them down. The playfulness necessary for children’s books cannot be sustained in the face of the urgent task of describing the political. These problems are not only personal for Patel but existential: America is at stake.
Both the urgency of the political moment and the didactic nature of the series are far more evident in the second book, “The Plot Against the King: 2,000 Mules.” This book is based on the book and documentary by Dinesh D’Souza, “2,000 Mules,” which also came out in 2022 and claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” by using “mules” to illegally stuff ballot boxes in swing states. Both the book and the film have been withdrawn as a result of lawsuits, along with apologies from their publisher and D’Souza. Patel’s version of this conspiracy theory, long since shown to be baseless, is, however, still available for 3-year-olds.
The second book opens with another Choosing Day approaching — in this case, the 2020 elections. “The current king, King Donald, was traveling all around his kingdom giving speeches to enormous crowds of his loving people,” it tells us, whereas “Donald’s opponent, Joe, spent most of his time in his mansion’s basement, and when he gave speeches, nobody came. It was pathetic. (Pathetic means he gave such bad speeches that people felt sorry for him.)”
Already, then, the contrast with the more lighthearted first book is clear; the influence of D’Souza’s “evidence” and the anger at the final outcome of the 2020 election are too much weight for an illustrated story to bear. The language has become spiteful, unsuitable for 3-year-olds. Whereas Russiagate was dressed up with cherry ginger ale and slugs, the reality of Patel’s America has only the lightest of fairy-tale gloss in this far angrier tale.
Biden is mostly “poor Joe,” pictured sleepy or asleep. A typical phrase reads: “Poor Joe, it looked like he had no idea how to be a king! Certainly not like King Donald did.” And here we have Patel’s vision of a monarch, the right monarch for America. “Donald had made sure that everyone who wanted a job could have one, the kingdom was respected by lands around the world, and hay for the horses had never been so cheap.”
But why a monarch at all? Of course, this is all told as a fairy tale, complete with medieval costumes, jousting and magic, so a king fits naturally into the narrative. But other aspects of the tale have been adapted for the American setting. After all, having a Choosing Day at all would have been alien to most medieval monarchies, as would the concern to provide jobs and cheap hay for the horses. And Trump himself has notoriously embraced the idea of kingship. On Feb. 19 of this year, he posted on Truth Social about congestion charging in New York, ending the post with “LONG LIVE THE KING!” The White House X account went a step further, using the same text but illustrated by a magazine cover resembling Time but instead labeled “TRUMP” and showing a crowned Trump against a New York backdrop, complete with the same caption: “LONG LIVE THE KING.” It isn’t subtle messaging. The country that emerged from a war waged to reject monarchical rule has given rise to a movement that views unchecked power as a triumph.
Patel’s trilogy isn’t claiming there shouldn’t be another election — far from it. The point of all three books is to save Choosing Day from the cheats who undermine it. The protagonists of the second book are “Dinesh and Debbie, candlestick makers,” referring to the D’Souzas (Debbie is Dinesh’s wife in real life), who track the mules’ “poo” and the glowing pink berries found in it, finding that mules had visited multiple “choosing boxes” set up by “Mischievous Metamark” — a reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose recent political about-face may spare him mention in any future works by Patel).
Wider conspiracies against Trump are far more explicit in this book, with the heralds blowing their trumpets loudly to cover up all the suggestions of foul play and convincing “the bluebird keeper to take Donald’s bluebird away.” Later, Donald gets “a new bird, an eagle, which he named Truth.” Again, the tale is seemingly aimed at knowing adults more than small children.
It’s all far less satisfying as a story: “We found a poo sample from a mule that had been at twenty seven different boxes,” a character explains at one point — hardly gripping prose for a toddler. And of course there isn’t a satisfying ending: Dinesh and Debbie have discovered the truth — that the election was a fraud — but King Joe remains king. So where book one concludes with the mirror of its “once upon a time” opening (“With that, the Kingdom was Made Great Again, and from that day on, they lived happily ever after”), the second can’t share this classic fairy-tale ending. But it manages to find another, concluding that Dinesh and Debbie are “heroes.” This simultaneously signals to Patel’s in-group that he knows they’re right and will staunchly support them, with more of the grandiosity that marked book one.
The third book in the series, “The Return of the King,” published in September 2024, returns to the lightheartedness of book one, thanks to Patel’s assumption that Trump would win the election two months later. It is still packed with inside jokes intended for adults, however. When the Poll Troll, with a very long scroll, confirms that most of the country is going to vote for King Donald, “Comma-la-la-la” unleashes the secret weapon of Baron Von Biden (as the former president is known in this book) — the Dragon of Jalapenos, or “DOJ.” Shifty, now a jester rather than a knight, feeds the dragon a few magical hot peppers and shows him a crudely faked photo of a dragon being taunted by three figures, who have the faces of Wizard Kash, Dinesh and King Donald taped on top of their bodies.
It’s enough to convince the DOJ who the enemy is. He seeks out King Donald, who runs to Wizard Kash for help (though it is made clear he “wasn’t scared”), escaping with just a singed ear (more nods and winks to the adults). Then the book transitions into a superhero story. When the dragon has Trump in his grasp, and all seems lost, Kash stamps on his foot, and “King Donald grabbed hold of the photo, kicked the dragon in the chest, and did a double backflip before dropping to the ground.” When the dragon realizes he has been played, King Donald hops on his back to chase Baron Von Biden — asleep in Comma-la-la-la’s arms — and Shifty out of the kingdom. Wizard Kash and friends have once again saved the Land of the Free and made possible an honest Choosing Day. It is difficult to see how a 3-year-old could absorb or enjoy the moral of the story.
Patel’s motivation is made explicit in his afterword to the first book, in the form of a nonfiction “explainer” — though it is not clear whether this is aimed at the adults (who have, after all, already bought the book) or curious older children (though would they really be revisiting picture books?). “The True Story of Kash Patel and Russiagate” is in a different font, with no pictures, and is very serious, outlining his real-life team’s response to the allegations against Trump, after being asked to do so by Nunes. “This book is one way I’m doing my part to share the truth,” Patel writes. “This story cannot be forgotten. … I hope you’ll do research for yourself so that you can learn the truth about this plot against the king. Blessings, Kash Patel.”
One major part of this message is the warning against being fooled by mainstream media — and, instead, to “do research for yourself” — made even more explicit in the afterword to the second book, written by D’Souza himself. “Clearly, something was wrong with the election,” his afterword says. “We have the evidence. This book is an attempt to share truth that cannot be erased. The answer is clear if you set aside the mainstream narrative and follow the clues.”
Sowing mistrust of the media and advocating “research” (though it is unclear why books and documentaries have privileged access to the truth over journalists) is just one part of Patel’s mission here. Perhaps the more important element of this trilogy, and the reason the fairy-tale framing is so perfect for Patel’s message, is that there is a fundamentally moral vision at the core of all three books, of a battle between the forces of good and evil. The Democrats are simply not to be trusted. The protagonists are the fairy-tale version of evil, constantly cooking up plots but without any attributed motivations. Wizard Kash, King Donald, Duke Devin and Dinesh and Debbie are similarly flat characters: unquestionably “good,” pursuing truth and justice.
Trump, too, views himself this way. As the psychologist Dan McAdams wrote for New Lines, “Trump insists that he is a force for good rather than evil” and “truly perceives himself to be qualitatively different from the rest of humankind. He has often compared himself to a superhero. He has famously described himself as a ‘stable genius’ who has never made a mistake.” This is precisely the hero Patel needed to spearhead his vision for America: a superhero who can do backflips out of a dragon’s clutch, the genius who never makes mistakes, making him infinitely trustable — unlike the devious Democrats, who would do anything for power. In McAdams’ words: “In the minds of millions, Trump is more than a person. And he is less than a person, too.” King Donald’s significance is indeed much greater than that of any other character in these books, but he is also utterly devoid of content, a cipher for the ideal of a noble character.
Looking at Patel’s other work shows that these picture books fit well within his broader project of saving America. The homepage of the website linked to at the end of the second and third books shows him as an action hero, striding away from a U.S. military helicopter, sunglasses on, purpose in his pose. The mission of his foundation includes educating the public “in areas the mainstream media refuses to cover.”
The same photo serves as the cover of his nonfiction book for adults, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy.” In the introduction, he describes “how the problems we face are not just the result of our leaders’ incompetence but more so their malice; how the media is not just one-sided but liars; and most of all how what became known as the Deep State isn’t some crazy conspiracy but a real force.” This is the reality of Hillary Queenton, Comma-la-la-la and the shifty knight: They are malicious actors against America, with the media in cahoots.
The language becomes more explicit, even shrill, through the introduction. Patel describes “a choice between whether America decides its policies and direction by vote, or whether we are ruled by the whims, egos, greed, and power struggles of a small body of incestuous, power-hungry, unelected oligarchs in Washington who hate us and play by their own made-up rules.” The stakes couldn’t be higher. “If they win, we don’t have a democracy, a republic, or a sovereign people anymore. We have a tyranny that has arrogated for itself the right to wield absolute control over the American people.” The opposition are corrupt, malicious, tyrannical liars who hate “us.” The message is entirely in line with “The Plot Against the King” series.
The “us” and “them” framing is key to understanding the sense of existential threat and is mirrored in an increasingly polarized American society: Many people on the other side of the MAGA movement see this moment as a similarly existential threat to America, a feeling crystallized by this book and the threats Patel describes. In “Government Gangsters,” he lists by name 60 members of the so-called “Deep State” who, in his view, pose a threat to a democratic America. Now that he is head of the FBI, it is harder to dismiss this as fringe conspiracism, despite its lack of evidence and his tendency in interviews to dismiss counterevidence, as his position has enabled him to act on his beliefs. One person on his list, FBI analyst Brian Auten, has already been suspended, and others are acting preemptively, as if they are next. This is exactly why conspiracy theories and their enablers must now be taken seriously. When Patel says of QAnon, “I agree with a lot of what that movement says,” it might have once seemed ludicrous or worthy of derision. But now, because of the power he can wield, it is serious. As Gabriel Gatehouse asked on the New Lines podcast recently: “What happens when the people who’ve been railing against the Deep State are actually in control, which is what just happened?” Patel has not hidden any of these beliefs and now has the power to act on them. We would do well to take all his books seriously.
The sense of urgency helps explain how Patel can ignore the white supremacism of many of his MAGA colleagues. As many people have observed, some people of color have been attracted to the Trump cause, not in spite of its white supremacist overtones but because the very terms used in discussions of race have changed. The political theorist Cristina Beltran coined the term “multiracial whiteness,” writing that Trump’s politics give Americans of color “freedom from the politics of diversity and recognition … the politics of multiracial whiteness reinforces their desired approach to colorblind individualism.” Fellow scholars Joe Lowndes and Daniel Martinez HoSang have explored the “multiracial right,” observing a similar phenomenon: “White” is no longer so much an ethnic or racial label but a political and ideological one. Anyone can follow a movement that promises unbridled freedom, in return for loyalty and a tolerance for demonizing those on the other side.
This far looser definition of race also applies to religion. Patel’s avowed Hindu faith (described in “Government Gangsters”) was no barrier to going with a Christian publisher, Brave Books, for his series of children’s books. (The books, and Patel himself, no longer appear on the publisher’s website. They have not responded to emails, calls and chats requesting comments.) Being on team MAGA is enough to be included in the fight.
But there’s something particularly important about the picture books prong of Patel’s work: They’re for 3-year-olds. Patel’s mission to save the soul of America from the forces of evil and the mass cover-up of the truth by the mainstream media is a long-term quest. The children are the next generation in the fight, as Patel recognizes. Trump’s essential (if one-dimensional) goodness, proven by his dedication to fighting the forces Patel and other conspiracy theorists have identified as the real threat to the country, must be communicated to the next generation so that they grow up on the right side of this existential fight. The grandiosity and the narcissism of the mission and the language used to portray it are necessary features, stemming from the belief that this is of historical importance. The future of the “Land of the Free” is in jeopardy, and Patel is the superhero fighting on multiple fronts, through his legal and political work, his books for adults, his nonprofit foundation — and his books for 3-year-olds. Wizard Kash is the true hero of Patel’s story, and Trump is his vehicle for saving the future of America.
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