If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so too are the roles of modern-day politicians—two in particular—who compete to dominate public opinion through the carefully crafted images they project to the public. Assisted by the media and entertainment industries, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have fashioned public personas that blur the line between politics and spectacle. This slim but ambitious book by Olena Leipnik traces the genealogy of their respective “media imageries” (vii), examining how each leader has been mythologized within the public psyche, and how, in the process, both come to function less as conventional political actors than as mythic figures. By doing so, it offers valuable behind-the-scenes insights into the process through which kings are made.
Parts I and II (5–96) show how Trump’s imagery draws on symbolic traditions established by the Founding Fathers, imagined not merely as statesmen but as heroes—almost demi-gods—of the young republic. Cast as rugged frontiersmen occupying the Oval Office, these early presidents found that scriptural references made political communication more accessible to a broad audience. To allow for complete “freedom of action,” presidents were increasingly permitted to be “morally imperfect and to pay no mind to the laws of the people” (15). Over time, this heroic framing evolved. Subsequent generations of political leaders would draw just as strategically on popular culture—from Westerns to fantasy epics such as Star Wars—to communicate authority, conflict and destiny to the masses, blending frontier mythology with pop-culture spectacle. Yet content alone has never been king, as this political spin history makes clear.
Even before the advent of modern technology, image management was as crucial as rhetoric. Early spin doctors already faced significant challenges with Abraham Lincoln, whose “ill-fitting clothes” and “unflattering features” (28) threatened to undermine his authority. His wardrobe was carefully adjusted to shorten the appearance of his ungainly long neck; facial hair was added to photographs to disguise dark circles and facial lines. As new media emerged—first radio, then television, and, eventually, the internet, the stakes intensified.
Richard Nixon famously fared better on radio than on television; Ronald Reagan instinctively understood which camera angles flattered him most; and Bill Clinton cemented his image as effortlessly cool when he donned dark sunglasses and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show (32). Trump, by contrast, mastered the logic of reality television and digital media, embracing excess, repetition, and provocation as tools not only of communication but of domination. In Part III (97–184) Leipnik shows how Trump incorporated his family fortune into his public persona, surrounding himself with a conspicuous “shower of gold” visible in “Trump’s image—the surroundings, the interiors, even his hair” (131).
A key contribution for non-Russian readers is in Part III, where Leipnik reframes Putin’s image as shaped less by classical western myth than by skazki, or traditional Russian fairy tales. Sergey Dorenko, an early Putin image-maker, described his “vision for the media format of the Russian presidency” (99) through a stark allegory: Russia as a woman who has been raped while her protector/brother was away doing military service. With the brother-soldier’s return, vengeance could be exacted and the sister’s honor restored.
This narrative, the author contends, structures Putin’s publicized life story, which closely follows the arc of a Russian fairy-tale. As a child, Putin was largely left to his own devices while his father served in World War II. Later, a “magical helper” flung open the door between “the ordinary world and the world of the KGB” (102), allowing him to embark on a career he could never previously have imagined. As in the fairy-tale tradition, the hero’s departure from home signals entry into another kingdom, following a miraculous transformation from a poor, rough, undisciplined, working-class boy into a “virtuous individual” (108). As Leipnik observes, “People know what is told in fairy tale is not true, but it does not have to be believable to be effective” (117).
The final two chapters turn to questions of time and space, applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopes in literature (122) to show how both Trump and Putin are situated within narrative worlds that suspend ordinary historical time and political accountability. By embedding these leaders in mythic temporalities and symbolic spaces—Putin in his castle, Trump in his parlor—their media imageries reinforce the sense that they stand apart from everyday politics—figures destined to act, disrupt, and endure beyond the constraints that bind ordinary politicians.
