Vice-president Mike Pence disappears down the rabbit hole

The nicest thing anyone can say about US vice-president Mike Pence – a man who vigorously opposed marriage equality and looks like an Action Man assembled from Play-Doh and cold cuts – is that he knows how to name a pet.

Marlon Bundo is not only the first Botus (Bunny of the United States), but may be the first rabbit to: a) ride in Air Force Two; b) hold an official Instagram account that documents his every bemused lollop across a seemingly endless collection of Persian rugs; and c) have an unofficial Twitter account that reveals a much harder edge. “This is Harley after being swamped by a wave of liberal tears,” Bundo crowed in November, posting a photo of the Pences’ dog looking slightly damp. Now Marlon is also the first rabbit to inspire a political war via picture books.

Marlon Bundo’s A Day in the Life of the Vice President, written by Pence’s daughter Charlotte and illustrated by his wife Karen, is a rather mild tale of a rabbit trailing Mike on his, as it turns out, rather boring average day (there are a lot fewer child sacrifices than you might think). But on Sunday, late-night TV host John Oliver announced that an alternative picture book, A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, by comedian Jill Twiss, would be coming out immediately – scooping the Pences’ book by a day – and would explore the rabbit’s struggle to marry a handsome bunny called Wesley.

Armed with a much cuter picture book and an audio version narrated by Jim Parsons, John Lithgow and others, Twiss’s take on Bundo’s life was an immediate success, with physical copies selling out on Amazon immediately. The rabbit’s Twitter account, meanwhile, reacted as you might expect: poorly. A weird, loaded tweet objected that Bundo, “if he was gay”, would actually marry gay conservative pundit Chadwick Moore. (Jesus, Bundo.) In one fell swoop, that tweet perfectly encapsulated Pence’s attitude to sexuality and individual freedom: a dude marrying a dude is just as ridiculous as Bundo and Wesley, or Bundo and a very confused Moore.

The disagreement has also inspired the kind of quality political dialogue we have come to expect: fighting in Amazon reviews. Oliver’s fans took en masse to giving the Pences’ book one-star reviews, while Pence’s fans counteracted with five-star reviews, with one pro-Pence Twitter user even calling on their comrades to “channel the Spirit of ’76 by ordering copies” of the book. That is presumably a reference to the 1776 American revolution, and not the 1990 David Cassidy film of the same name, but who knows?

Either way, proceeds from Pence’s book go to a children’s cancer charity and a trafficking charity, and the money from Twiss’s to Aids United and the LGBTQ charity the Trevor Project. So perhaps, after all this shrieking into the void from our comfy filter bubbles, the world is a better place now. Again, who knows?