Readers may react very differently to this post in 2025 than when it was first published in 2021. It remains to be seen if authors and illustrators, amateur and professional, will be moved to comment in picture books on events since the inauguration. 
Since 2016, over two dozen children’s books written from either side of the aisle have tackled the difficult task of explaining the current administration’s policies to young readers. Some of the most interesting ones purchased for the research collection of the Cotsen Children’s Library are surveyed here.
President Donald J. Trump Paper Dolls. Dover Publications, 2017. (Cotsen)
Dover Books captured the glamour of Donald John Trump’s inauguration in a commemorative paper doll book. The new First Lady’s pale blue Ralph Lauren ensemble and other Trump women’s designer gowns outshine the President’s dark blue coat, business suit, and long red tie.
The Trump Family Story. [Middletown, 2021]. (Cotsen)
Of all the picture books introducing the Trump clan to young members of the Republic, the most mysterious (and inaccurate) is
The Trump Family Story. Donald’s father’s name is given as ‘”Frederick” and “Farid;” Tiffany is identified as one of Trump’s sons, and Eric junior’s name is misspelled “Arik.” A few Arabic words and logos for Wavefront obj.files were never removed.
The Trump Family Story was purchased through Amazon and printed at its Middletown, Delaware facility January 13 2021. There are no credits anywhere, but there is an ISBN number, which when Googled, lands you on the Walt Design Facebook page giving the pamphlet’s publication date as May 20, 2020. The Marseilles-based firm was also responsible for an introduction to Minecraft.
Donald Trump: America’s 45th President. Peachtree City: Carole Marsh/Gallopade International, ©2016. (Cotsen)
Donald Trump the 45th President (2016) is the only example of a fun-fact introduction to this occupant of the White House. It was produced by Gallipolade International, an educational publishing company founded by Carole Marsh that produces materials supporting curriculum in social studies. Before diving into sections describing the Electoral College, the line of succession, and the history of Camp David, young readers learn that Donald Trump loves See’s Candies, scrapes the toppings of the crust of his pizza, and styles his hair after Melania cuts it. Informative activities include quick quizzes, a form for drafting a letter to the chief executive, and a maze (help the Secret Service find the president who’s gone to make a snack in the kitchen).
Donald Builds the Wall! Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, [2019]. (Cotsen)
Eric Metaxas, the conservative cultural commentator, syndicated radio show host, and Yale alum, comes out fighting for free markets in
Donald Builds the Wall (Washington, D. C.: Regnery, 2019) the second of three volumes illustrated by Tim Raglin in the “Donald the Caveman” series. Donald’s wall is not supposed to keep out illegal immigrants south of the border, but Swamp Creatures Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders who want government to stymie the Free People’s individual innovation and entrepreneurship. Metaxas considers this fable with its affable Fred Flintstone-like hero a light-hearted political satire for adults that will engage the kids, even though a lot of the material will go over their heads.
Trump and the Dragon. [USA]: Great American Children’s Books, [ca 2017]. (Cotsen)
The connection to political reality is just as tenuous in Deena Marie’s
Trump and the Dragon (n.d.) illustrated by Josseline Villalobos and Candice Han, companion piece to
Obama and the Pirates, in which the two presidents must demonstrate just how far they will go to solve an ally’s problem. The president of China summons the president of the United States to rid his land of a singing dragon whose songs are so atrocious that people are vacating their villages. The dragon’s name? Dylan. Great American Children’s Books published it.
A Lib I Am! [USA], c2017. (Cotsen)
Trump’s apologists have not turned out many parodies for the conservative cause. However, Bill Hunt, former San Clemente police chief and lieutenant in the Orange County sheriff’s department now a professional artist, turns Dr. Seuss’s
Green Eggs and Ham (1960) into a spoof on hysterical liberals’ categorical refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election. The liberal, an old, white, bearded hippy in sandals and a bowler, rants to Uncle Sam, “I do not like Trump in the White House./ I do not like that lecherous louse,/ I do not like Trump here or there,” I do not like Trump anywhere! / I do not like Trump, / He’s just a sham. / I do not like Trump.” By the end of
A Lib I Am! An adult reader about children (2017) the poem, the lib loses it and threatens to “make up fake news / And cause mass disruption,” incite civil unrest from coast to coast, and get into bed with Arab radicals to thwart the president’s administration.
Dear Mr President. London: Templar Books, 2019. (Cotsen)
A brief pause for Dear Mr. President (United Kingdom: Templar Books, 2019), a picture book whose author/illustrator made an honest attempt to break down one of the signature political initiatives of the Trump administration in an accessible way without oversimplifying its complexity. Sam has decided that his big brother, with whom he shares a bedroom, sounds like an undesirable according to President Trump’s definition. Building a wall sounds like a good solution to the problem of his brother’s thoughtlessness, so Sam writes a series of letters to the American president telling him about his construction project’s progress. During family discussions Dad has a word with his older son and hostilities begin to subside. Sam comes around to the idea that “communication and negotiation are always preferable to separation,” especially now that he knows that the great walls of history didn’t attain their builders’ objectives. It’s probably no coincidence that this gentle, common-sense story illustrated by Anne Villeneuve is the work of New Zealander Sophie Stier.
Donald Don’t Grab that Pussy. [USA], c2017. (Cotsen)
The American author/illustrators of picture books attacking the president do not feel obligated to respect the office or the its incumbent, which does not necessarily result in mean, clever satire that pulls down the object to a contemptible level. The premise of
Donald Don’t grab that Pussy (201) by Mike McAllen and illustrated by Lovyaa Garg is funny only as long as the novelty of the idea of Michelle Obama teaching the little Donald how to treat our animals friends with “respect and care” wears off. Beyond that, there’s no meaningful play off the infamous Access Hollywood tape, which presumably inspired the book.
Take a Trump. [USA, ca 2017]. (Cotsen)
In
Take a Trump (n.d.), the anonymous author avoids taboo words and lets the pictures lead on the reader. A little girl trying to get her mind around the adult chatter floating overhead and comes to the mistaken conclusion that “trump” rhymes with a synonym for an embarrassing bodily function.
The Very Angry Caterwauler. [USA], c2017. (Cotsen)
Trump’s liberal enemies have been quick to whip off parodies of famous children’s books. Diminishing an adversary through infantilization is, of course, one of the oldest, funniest, and unfairest techniques in the satirist’s arsenal, which doesn’t make it easy to pull off. D. Trumple Thinskin bit off more than he could chew in
The very angry Caterwauler (n.p.: Lies & Prevarications, 2017), an “Auntie-American Tragicomedy.” Without the means to suggest transformation through the original’s brilliant use of illustrated vertical flaps with cut-outs, the best Thinskin can manage is a greasy rumble of words, “But at last, it was Election Day. The angry caterwauler choked down a taco (most certainly not from a truck!) forced a shit-eating grin onto a quesadilla lips and burped out a few more rancid cheesy lies. By evening, he was feeling much better.”
If You Give the President a Twitter Account. New York: Humorist Books, 2019. (Cotsen)
Laura Nemeroff’s famous series has been taken of advantage for Trump parodies at least twice. Matt Lassen’s If You Give the President a Twitter Account (New York: Humorist Books, 2019), is as much an indictment of the role pundits on network and cable television feed into the 24-hour news cycle that allows Trump to manipulate coverage to his advantage, while Trump’s less presidential traits are the butt of Fay Kanouse’s If You Give a Pig the White House (New York: Castle Point Books, 2019).
If You Give a Pig the White House. New York: Castle Point Books, 2019. (Cotsen N-002892)
It’s a pity that Kanouse and her illustrator Amy Zhing have not yet produced the three other books advertised on the dust jacket flap: If You Put a Snake on the Supreme Court, Ivanka and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad President, and Oh, the Prisons You’ll Go To.
Goodnight Trump. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018. (Cotsen N-002893)
Possibly the most trenchant picture book parody about the Trump administration is Goodnight Trump (Boston: Little Brown, 2018), unsurprisingly the work of Erich Origen and Gan Golan of the New York Times. The text and pictures skillfully weave together details about the president’s self-promotion, alignment of the country’s interests with those of authoritarian regimes, trade policies, exploitation of the tax laws, immigration policies, etc. to crest in an apocalyptic vision of Washington being swept clean: “Goodnight global climate shock / Goodnight ticking Doomsday Clock / Good night allies thrown under the bus / Goodnight “the best people” / Goodnight cover-up brush / … / Goodnight swamp / Goodnight troll / Goodnight upended Old Glory / Goodnight hole in the soul / Goodnight to the lies and the truths he evades/ Goodnight Trump and his whole sad charade.”
Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown. San Francisco: Chronicle Prism, [2020]. (Cotsen N-002895)
The major events of the Trump administration’s last year were recorded through April 2020 by actor John Lithgow in
Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown: Verses for a Despotic Age, his second unflattering tribute to Forty-Five. Outrage and disbelief charges the penultimate poem, “Our Witch Doctor in Chief:”
“Dumpty suggests disinfectant injections/ To save us from COVID’s pernicious infections, / Or a frontal attack to defeat it outright / By blasting our lungs with salubrious light, / A blithering idiot, gone round the bend: / When in the world will this lunacy end?”
Don’t Be Like Tump. [USA, 2021]. (Cotsen)
Two journalists, Carol Vinzany and John Connolly try another approach to summing up 2016-2021 in
Don’t Be Like Trump: The Smart Kid’s Guide to President Trump. It’s the book they wish they had had to explain to their children the impact of Trump administration policies on American society instead of library biographies, which they felt were short on history, biography, and analysis. Chapters about “Is It Okay to Make Fun of the President?” “Dictator Word Search,” “Activities to Annoy Your Parents with Trump,” are mixed up with others about the rollbacks of environmental protections, the Mueller investigation, the impeachment trial, police brutality, and the 2020 election.
Picture books about the tumultuous transition after the election, culminating in the January 6th riot in the Capitol Building, could appear within months. No account of the Trump presidency from the left or right should omit it, but who will touch it? That remains to be seen. This motley crew of picture books and their even scruffier friends, which didn’t make the final cut, will surely give future historians pause.
Note: Readers now may react very differently to this post than when it was first published in 2021. A new round of authors may have been inspired by events since the inauguration last January to comment via picture books….
The title of Michael Morpurgo’s The Ogre Who Wasn’t (2023) gives fair warning. A somewhat forced reinvention of Grimms’ The Frog Prince is odd place to invoke the presence of a monster. Motherless Princess Clara discovers a teeny tiny ogre in the garden and stows him under the bed in a hot pink character shoe. 
Because her father is away most of the time, the disagreeable servants try to constrain her but she defies them by keeping an extensive menagerie in her room and running wild barefoot in the garden in dirty shorts with uncombed hair. One evening she confides her pain to her best friend the loyal little ogre, who reveals that he is really the Toad King and has magical powers, which can be put at her service. He grants her wishes to scrap the help and give her a stay-at-home dad with a nice new wife. There is nothing more for the new racially blended family to do in this sweetly vapid story but live happily ever after.
The creature in Peter McCarty’s 2009 picture book Jeremy Draws a Monster is quite satisfying–big, blue, and bulky with multiple horny protrusions, pinpoint eyes, big 
nostrils and bare earholes (funny preparatory drawings turn up on the endpapers). But things go awry almost immediately. It wants a sandwich, when it ought to threaten Jeremy, a much more substantial mouthful. It wants consumer goods to help pass the time, including a television so it can watch the game. Wearing a dandy red hat, it goes out on the town and hogs the single bed when it gets back very late. That is the last straw. Jeremy draws a suitcase and one-way bus ticket and escorts the big blue pest to the station in the morning. Then he joins the neighborhood kids in games for the first time. Obviously the ogre is a projection of Jeremy’s imagination, which probably explains why his creation won’t eat him and goes without putting up a fight. If it isn’t real and only looks dangerous, then the story deflates without any conflict between the two unequal characters. Even if the point were that monsters are all in your head, of which I’m unconvinced, the imagination demands the possibility of them being real.
Leave it to David Sedaris to think up Pretty Ugly (2024), a typically weird story, the last to be illustrated by the late Ian Falconer. Dedicated to Tiffany, Sedaris’s sister who committed suicide, he also pays tribute to the ability of sister Amy to make ghastly faces. 
Whenever the adorable little ogrichon Anna is awful, she is so good that her parents and grandmother coo that she really is “something.” Her bad habit of making dreadful faces–adoring gran starts at the fuzzy bunny gran–prompts her mother to warns her quite correctly that if she doesn’t stop it, she’s going to be sorry. Anna dismisses her concern, until the features of her most horrible face of all (shown to the left) cannot be reversed. Even a medical intervention fails to restore her face to its original loveliness. While her loving family can live with their little monstrosity in a new guise, her peer group has no problem reminding how her how hideous she is now. After secluding herself in the wood shed for a miserable three days, Anna remembers her grandmother’s consoling words about true inner beauty and sticks her hand down her throat to turn herself inside out, which solves the problem (below). There is nothing traditional about this ogre story, but if they ever start creating picture books about family life, they could do worse than take Sedaris as their literary model.
I’m not sure why authors and illustrators who have been busy reinventing Western folklore’s traditional baddies have smoothed off most of their rough edges. As monsters go, an ogre is terrifying, but otherwise uncomplicated. It stomps around, uses brute force to capture people, and devours them, sometimes with guests. Maybe it tosses the bones into a large, grisly, untidy heap outside its dwelling place. Still, a brave and quick-thinking child like Little Thumb has a shot at defeating one. But perhaps the classic stand-off between big and small compares unfavorably with old and modern stories about Japanese yokai and requires big injections of horror and violence to hold its own in today’s media environment. Time to clap if you believe in ogres?
