MAGA as Fan Fiction

On America’s runaway Story Drive.

By Gideon JacobsJanuary 18, 2026

• Politics

ONCE UPON A TIME, the United States had an FBI director named Kash Patel—spelled K$H on his custom challenge coins, branded wines, and anti-vaccine supplements—who, before ascending to the nation’s highest seat of investigative power, wrote a children’s book trilogy. The first installment of The Plot Against the King was published in 2022. It told the tale of “Kash the Distinguished Discoverer,” a wizard who finds that “Hillary Queenton,” “Keeper Komey,” and a “shifty” knight were behind nasty rumors about King Donald and the “Russionians.” In 2,000 Mules, a sequel published later that year, Kash and “curious candlestick makers” Dinesh and Debbie unravel a new evil plot: “poor,” “pathetic,” “stinky” Joe and his “right hand woman,” “Comma-la-la-la,” cheated on “Choosing Day.” (The book summarized Dinesh D’Souza’s thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that Democrats used “mules” to stuff ballot boxes in the 2020 election. D’Souza’s film and book on the subject had been withdrawn because of lawsuits, though Patel’s series—for “children ages 3 and up”—remains on sale.)

The trilogy concluded with The Return of the King, which arrived a few months before the 2024 election. This time, “Baron von Biden” (now endowed with a title), Comma-la-la-la (now the baron’s assistant), and Shifty (now a jester) sic their pet “Dragon of Jalapenos” (DOJ for short) on beloved King Donald. In the telling, the Land of the Free remains so thanks to the “great and powerful” Kash. He stomps on the dragon’s foot and borrows a line from a more iconic trilogy—“You shall not pass!”

Absurd and horrifying as these books may have been, propaganda aimed at children was nothing new. In 1938, a Nazi-associated press published Der Giftpilz, which taught that distinguishing Jews from Gentiles was as critical and subtle an art as distinguishing poisonous mushrooms from nutritious ones. In 1945, the Japanese Navy produced the Disney-inspired Momotaro: Sacred Sailors, the country’s first feature-length animated film, to prepare children for a potential invasion. In 2005, the CIA commissioned a former Hasbro executive to fabricate demonic-looking Osama bin Laden action figures—program code name: “Devil Eyes.”

What made Patel’s contributions to the genre feel distinct was their artlessness. Mechanically paced, arbitrarily specific, and full of discontinuities, the books were slapdash Mad Libs designed to trigger the libs. This may have been a result of their author’s biography and personality; Patel, 42 at the time of the first book’s publication, had no children and once joked, “I can barely write a level above grade two.” It was also possible he didn’t write the books at all, that they were ghostwritten or made with AI, though one might have assumed that the average large language model, even in 2022, would have noticed the opportunity to turn Kamala into something more sensible, like Commie-la.

The books’ production value, too, was notably low, the kind of paraphernalia found on a CPAC folding table rather than in a bookstore. Of course, President Trump, the apple of Patel’s famously sycophantic eye, had made a career out of ignoring quality. Whether in real estate, retail, political campaigns, or government, Trump focused on quantity and branding, overwhelming audiences with a deluge of low-quality products and, more importantly, aggressive messaging that insisted those products were “the best.” The Plot Against the King trilogy was, in a way, the Trump Steaks of children’s propaganda, or the K$H Patel of FBI directors.

But unlike Trump’s rib eyes, the books sold well, reportedly over 110,000 copies. Commenting on the success, Patel once said: “I think parents are having more fun with the book than the kids are.” It seemed the trilogy’s threadbare veils and lazy parallels were not deficiencies but precisely what made it effective and popular. It seemed that, at this point in American politics, children’s propaganda no longer required artful translation or coded metaphors. The median MAGA supporter’s reality already resembled the structure, logic, and tone of fairy tales.

In everyday adult life, after all, the president and his surrogates were framing politics as a cinematic epic of universal Good versus Evil: Republicans as DC Comics’ Justice League, Democrats as the Legion of Doom; Republicans as Star Wars’ Rebel Alliance, Democrats as the Galactic Empire. The stakes were, as in any captivating legend, existentially high. Before polls opened in 2024, Elon Musk posted, “There is nowhere to go. This election is a verdict on civilization.” Before Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Michael Anton, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, wrote an influential essay that identified 2016 as “the Flight 93 election”: “charge the cockpit or you die.”

Of course, Trump was also nicknaming his political foes using puns and alliteration, ancient tricks of storytelling that make phrases easy to remember and share: Gavin Newscum, Tampon Tim, Ron DeSanctimonious. He was using direct descriptors and relentless repetition to turn his enemies into caricatures, archetypally evil, insane, or weak villains: Crooked Hillary, Crazy Nancy, Cryin’ Chuck. The internet was flooded, often by White House accounts, with images of Trump’s visage atop bodies of emblematically good, strong, and brave heroes: Trump as gladiator, Trump as Rocky Balboa, Trump as Top Gun pilot dropping feces on protesters. This mode extended well beyond the president; heroes need sidekicks. See, for example, ICE’s acting director Tom Homan as the Sun Baby from Teletubbies, an eye in the sky spotting immigrants in the desert, or K$H’s aforementioned challenge coin featuring the skull motif from Marvel’s The Punisher.

Even policy was being presented via pop myths. The administration’s trade wars were framed using Game of Thrones (“SANCTIONS ARE COMING”), its gleefully cruel immigration enforcement using Pokémon (“Gotta Catch ’Em All”) and The Batman (“They think I’m hiding in the shadows, but I am the shadows”). The videos and memes grew even more absurd when functioning as pure agitprop, Uncle Sam as edgelord: anti-immigration “ASMR,” the “soothing” sounds of deportees’ clinking handcuffs and chain; “Christmas After Mass Deportations,” a kaleidoscopic, EDM-soundtracked AI slopfest with flashes from holiday films like Elf (2003), The Santa Clause (1994), Die Hard (1988), and—inexplicable but intriguing—Blade Runner 2049 (2017).

This level of integration of story into government was jarring but made sense considering that Trump and his staff were far more steeped in storytelling than governing. Other than loyalty, experience on reality television—as in, any show where people play themselves—was the administration’s common hiring prerequisite. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon was the CEO of and a performer for the World Wrestling Federation. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy was a contestant on MTV’s The Real World: Boston (1997) and Road Rules: All Stars (1998). The administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Mehmet Oz, hosted The Dr. Oz Show (2009–22). And then, of course, there were the many staffers and appointees who had been hosts on Fox News: Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Deputy Director of the FBI Dan Bongino, United States Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and more. Appropriately, their boss was the most credentialed of all: on IMDb, Trump has 35 actor credits, 21 producer credits, and 726 credits as “self.”

The perennial fear, expressed by thinkers from Plato to Guy Debord to Jean Baudrillard, that politics could be corrupted by performance and transformed into pure spectacle, seemed to have been finally and fully realized. It was just three decades before the rise of Trumpism that media theorist Neil Postman wrote his seminal book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). Reacting to television’s effect on public life, Postman hypothesized, as reflected in his book’s subtitle, that that society had exited the “Age of Typography” and entered the “Age of Show Business.” It was an argument built atop Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “The medium is the message”—the claim that societies are shaped more by the nature of the technologies with which they communicate than by the contents of their communications.

Print media, Postman believed, with its inherent linearity, abstraction, and permanence, had been conducive to a few centuries of discourse that, for the most part, allowed for rationality. Television, on the other hand, emphasized visuality, brevity, and fragmentation, which rendered information “simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual.” The result was discourse that increasingly favored emotion over reason and style over substance. In a moment that saw Ronald Reagan—the United States’ first actor-turned-president—as the leader of the free world and Trump rising to international fame and wealth, Postman posited that the rules for what made for “good TV” had become, simply, the rules.

But for all his pessimism, Postman could not be dismissed as a cranky Luddite. He didn’t have qualms with TV or entertainment in themselves. Television, he wrote, “serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse […] ‘The A-Team’ and ‘Cheers’ are no threat to our public health. ‘60 Minutes,’ ‘Eye-Witness News’ and ‘Sesame Street’ are.” It was programming that purported to be serious or real that Postman worried about. These shows, by muddying the lines between information and entertainment, reality and story, were birthing a new gray area in which everything would be forced to live. In a sense, what the prophetic theorist—who died in 2003, the year Trump began filming The Apprentice—was warning about was proto–reality television. His book, considered a “classic,” sold 200,000 copies. Trump’s show averaged 20.7 million viewers per week in its first season.

What would Postman have made of the internet of 2026? Long gone was the web of the techno-optimistic 1990s, the internet as an experimental playspace populated by early adopters. When the United States crossed “the 50-yard-line” in 2000—over half its population online—the internet quickly grew serious and real. In 1999, 0.4 percent of US households were online banking. Four years later, that number had risen to 31 percent. Wikipedia launched in 2001 and the internet began its transformation into an authoritative repository of facts. Social media, largely introduced by Facebook in 2004, made screen-name pseudonymity a niche mode, and the internet became a place where people used their real names and real faces to say things that were as consequential as speech in real life. The New York Times and BBC News created Twitter handles in 2007, and soon the internet, which had subsumed the previous century’s media of video, images, audio, and text, was presenting users with the entire spectrum of serious to unserious and real to unreal in a single glance. Postman’s worrisome gray areas of television gave way to a gray realm—that murky, low-chroma gray that results from mixing all the paints in the set.

And yet, there was another significant line the internet muddied: that between performer and audience—or, as scholar Jay Rosen called them in a viral blog post in 2006, “the people formerly known as the audience.” Whereas TV was experienced passively, the internet was participatory. Companies built “platforms” on top of which users could buy and sell, speak and listen, watch and stream, sparking a transformation that Rosen’s contemporary Clay Shirky dubbed “mass amateurization.” As Web 2.0 transitioned to 3.0 in the 2020s, even Postman’s beloved written word was thriving in this new mode. Billions of them were being typed and read on Twitter/X every day. Amid reports that reading for pleasure in the United States had dropped 40 percent, fan fiction site Archive of Our Own was receiving almost two billion page views per month—more than The New York Times or ESPN—and Wattpad boasted 665 million uploaded stories.

The masses were no longer trained to sit back and be entertained by elites on the tube performing using birth names or screen names in shows presented as real or fictional. The masses now expected—and were expected—to play. The binary of celebrity and everyday person grew spectral. All citizens on the internet, regardless of size of following, grew practiced in playing themselves. And as the country crossed a new 50-yard-line—over half of its waking hours spent online—living a good life increasingly meant living a good story, as experience itself became charged with the subtle but omnipresent pressure to contain qualities that make something watchable: comedy and tragedy, conflict and resolution, meaning and stakes, and—most importantly once feeds went algorithmic—affective intensity, regardless of direction. Reality TV was replaced with TV Reality, and the writers room contained everyone.

What was the phenomenon of QAnon but a popular mixed-reality fan fiction unfolding in real time? That kludgy, byzantine conspiracy saga about Donald Trump bringing a cabal of Deep State–enabled pedophiles to justice began with a single author—an anonymous user on 4Chan who claimed to be entrenched in the government—but quickly became a collaboration between the one in five Americans who believed its core conspiracies, a cottage industry of QAnon content creators, and even a few government officials, including Kash Patel. The Distinguished Discoverer had come under scrutiny for signing his children’s books with the QAnon catchphrase, #WWG1WGA (“Where we go one, we go all”). When asked to explain himself, he said it was just a line “from a great movie that I watched a long time ago.”

What was the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but a fan fiction IRL meetup, a live action role-playing or alternate reality game that some took more seriously than others? The gray ontology of that gray afternoon in Washington, DC, manifested in a surreal scene that was part war, part war reenactment—some participants in body armor, some in costumes, and a few carrying concealed props with bullets in them. In his controversial speech earlier that morning, Donald Trump said, “[I]f you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” MAGA, like the medium on which it was incubated and thrived, was participatory and hybridized.

It was telling that, after allegedly assassinating conservative personality Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson told his friends on Discord, “My doppelganger is trying to get me in trouble,” as if the killer were his alt, an avatar in a parallel plotline whose consequences were leaking into this one. It was equally telling when, later that week at the news conference to announce Robinson’s arrest, Patel spoke as if in character, inhabiting a medieval epic: “To my friend Charlie Kirk, rest now, brother. We have the watch, and I’ll see you in Valhalla.” (Patel was referencing the realm in Norse mythology where noble warriors reside after death, a concept that was often fetishized by Nazis and neo-Nazis. The phrase “see you in Valhalla” was how far-right mass murderers in both Christchurch, New Zealand, and Buffalo, New York, signed off their manifestos in 2019 and 2022, respectively.)

The internet turned out to be, as the techno-optimists of its early days dreamed, a revolutionary, democratizing force, though mostly in the very specific way Walter Benjamin saw as a hallmark of fascist societies. In his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (as translated by Harry Zohn), Benjamin wrote that “fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.”

Benjamin was writing in Germany as the Nazis were using the newly ubiquitous radio to build a living myth the population could inhabit. Arguably, Adolf Hitler was not trying to return his nation to a specific past or even realize a material future; he aimed to transmogrify it into fiction. As infamous Nazi esotericist Savitri Devi once wrote, “the World of the [Wagnerian] Sagas was precisely that which, more decisively than anything else, ‘conditioned [Hitler’s] historical and political views.’ It was the consciousness of the world ‘to which he felt he actually belonged.’”

Benjamin called it the “aestheticization of politics.” Later, philosopher Ernst Cassirer called it the “mythicization” of “man’s political life.” But radio was consumed passively, like television, about which Postman had said the single most important thing was that “people watch it, which is why it’s called ‘television.’” Playing with that semantic logic, the single most important thing about the internet was that people got caught in its net. The world wide web was an entangling and enveloping medium, something inhabited as much as observed, blurring yet another line—that between the act of being and what Benjamin called “expression.”

Of course, long before any advanced communication technologies, humans had been drawn not just to stories but also to the possibility of living as characters within them. Story’s appeal had always been precisely that it’s not like reality. The two words, in theory, were antonyms, just as “reality television” was oxymoronic. The dream of living inside a story was a dream of existing free from the pesky flaws intrinsic to reality: uncontrollability, unpredictability, vulnerability, mundanity, complexity, incoherence, confusion, pain. The word “human,” used as an adjective, was a synonym for flawed. Being “realistic” meant accepting the unavoidability of flaws. The word “utopia,” a flawless place, when broken down to its Greek roots, meant “no place.” So, at a fundamental level, the desire to be a character was—like the Silicon Valley Right’s desire for immortality—a desire not to be human at all. In secular terms, humanity’s Story Drive was a cousin of Freud’s death drive—“the instinct to return to the inanimate state,” to exist as an image, object, robot, or pure data. In religious terms, it was a transcendence drive, a strain of the perennial desire for divine salvation.

Simone Weil, amending Karl Marx, wrote, “It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.” Benjamin wrote, “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.” The fiery movement to Make America Great Again was a classic example of soteriology and messianism taken too literally, an absence of the simultaneity of metaphor, the narrowness of flesh or spirit rather than flesh and spirit, people living in story rather than with stories. Trump had weaponized a struggling nation’s understandably desperate appetite for reenchantment, helping his followers shove a painfully imperfect square peg through a perfectly round hole in order to Make America Meaningful Again. A “more perfect” union wasn’t enough; MAGA wanted MAMA. The chaos the internet had unleashed on politics was the same chaos it had unleashed on everything—not true chaos, which, in the mathematical sense, is illegible and therefore meaningless and therefore boring. This chaos—Trump-branded—was anything but. Its drama was the frenetic ferment of too much meaning, the disorder of too much order, structure, and other qualities that make narratives compelling and images watchable. Story Drive in hyperdrive at scale.

For years, Elon Musk had been regularly posting versions of the sentiment that “the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.” A self-avowed simulationist, he usually framed this pattern as a result of our simulation’s overlords wanting, like any audience, a good show. Regardless of what one made of Musk’s cosmology, his pet theory offered an alternative to conspiracy in an era regularly delivering “suspiciously” iconic events and images such as, say, Trump’s perfectly choreographed near-assassination. Quantum physicists—as well as the religious magi of the past and the chaos magicians of the present—had long known that observation affects the observed, that reality is a collaboration between subject and object. Considering that, for the first time in history, there were many more cameras in the world than there were people, it seemed possible that reality was, quite literally, performing for them, obeying rules of story as it does laws of physics. Maybe the era’s strangeness was the result of a small but palpable decrease in the je ne sais quoi entropy that had always made reality feel real, an increase in the uncanny neatness we tend to associate with what is scripted or staged.

If one entertained these speculative notions about entertainment, at some point a question would arise: how might such a story-driven history end? In 2024–25, Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s earliest and most prominent champions, had become preoccupied with the ending. He was regularly writing and talking about the New Testament’s grand finale, John of Patmos’s apocalyptic Book of Revelation. He even gave a series of off-the-record lectures in San Francisco about the concept of the Antichrist, who or what it might turn out to be. It was sometimes difficult to parse Thiel’s theology—his conversation with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat sounded like a prime example of someone who knows what they’re talking about interviewing someone who does not—but it was clear his end-times anxieties were, like the political movement he’d funded, fueled by Story Drive.

Risking flippancy, it often appeared his thesis was simply this: in the sci-fi fictions of his childhood, the 21st century was rendered far more technologically advanced than it turned out to be. He told Douthat, “‘Back to The Future Part II’ was 1985 to 2015, which is now a decade in the past. That’s where you had flying cars.” In 2011, he said, “We were promised flying cars, but instead we got 140-character tweets.” Reality hadn’t fulfilled the image of the future Thiel had been “promised,” and that, he flew around the country arguing, was indicative that something had gone terribly and cosmically wrong. The forces that caused technological stagnation, then, were the problem. So, he replaced the failed fictions of his childhood with a new one, a biblical prophecy come to life in which he could play hero and people like AI-alarmist Eliezer Yudkowsky or climate activist Greta Thunberg could play villain—the Antichrist. It was a theology of resenting reality’s realism. Thiel wanted an image—utopia. His desire to go back to the future was a desire to go back to the Garden.

To be clear, Story Drive had no left-right valence. And the battlefield of politics had long been society’s containers of communication, McLuhan’s media. In the 1952 presidential race, Adlai Stevenson tried to resist this fact, refusing to appear in campaign commercials—“This isn’t Ivory Soap vs. Palmolive.” He was, unsurprisingly, crushed in the electoral college 442–89 by Dwight Eisenhower, whose catchy ads were produced by Roy Disney. In 2025, Zohran Mamdani rose from obscurity to become mayor of New York City by harnessing Story Drive better than any politician since Trump. With short-form videos and well-executed caricaturizing of policies and self, Mamdani quickly established a highly legible image: a smile in an affordable suit, the Peter Parker to Trump’s Kingpin. Mamdani’s sincerity and authenticity were unfakably real, which is true of all great performers. But setting politics, morality, and decency aside—looking at medium rather than message—the difference between the two politicians’ approaches was taste: Trump came out of crass reality TV, while Mamdani was raised by an Academy Award–nominated mother. Third-place mayoral finisher Curtis Sliwa chalked up their surprisingly chummy White House summit to the camaraderie of actors. Trump’s unwonted warmth appeared to be an instance of “game recognizes game.”

The question of endings, then, wasn’t necessarily one of good or bad stories, serious or unserious videos, realistic or unrealistic images, but whether this ancient, accretive arms race was sustainable. Postman didn’t think so: “[T]here is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist once put it, we all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them.” But in a way, Trump had proven him wrong. For decades, armed with his own version of Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking,” Trump existed in a precarious limbo between reality and story, halfway between ground and sky, staying afloat like Wile E. Coyote before he looks down. But then, unclear exactly when, something shifted, and even if Trump allowed himself the occasional peek, he didn’t fall, barely stumbled. The gravitational pull from above was now able to compete with that coming from below, the cloud’s mass rivaling the earth’s. To his supporters, he appeared to be walking on air—a prophet, a miracle. Much to their excitement and relief, he invited them up.

Up, up, up, like the rockets of the world’s billionaires, whose missions, too, were now algorithm-genic, celebrity-stuffed spectacles and gray-area productions that sent fictional space captains into outer space. Up, up, up, like the world’s financial markets, which, after centuries of drifting from materiality, had finally become free-floating bubbles, poppable only if their surface tension wasn’t maintained. Up, up, up, like the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, united by “one language,” attempts to build to the heavens until God intervenes and scatters them across the earth.

If one reads that fable with Thielian teleology, it could be understood as an urgent cautionary tale; humanity is, after all, united by a single language—computer binary, this time—and seemingly (like the Babylonians, and also Prometheus, Icarus, etc.) doomed to fall from our hubristic heights. But if one reads the fable with McLuhanesque metaphoricity—as in, the miraculous and distinctly human ability to see message and sense medium at the same time—this tragic but reasonable conclusion can be paired with a contradictory truth: these are just words, just images, just stories. That is, even if the issue of happily ever or never after seems to have been the subtextual question of postmodernity all along—Could the revolution, in fact, be televised? Could cameras indeed replace God?—any answers will lie beyond the plane of ideas, sights, and sounds. As philosopher Graham Harman puts it, “The real is something that cannot be known, only loved.” As many stories conclude in a reality that never does, “The End.”