Introduction
In the second season of his hit TV show Servant of the People, President Vasyl Holoborodko—played by current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—finds himself in the process of securing a crucial loan agreement for Ukraine from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As the deal nears completion, he is presented with a series of unofficial “additional clauses” that drastically alter the agreement’s terms. To receive the funding, Ukraine must begin large-scale shale gas extraction—devastating the country’s environment—curtail agricultural and wheat production, and designate the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone as a nuclear waste disposal site. The officials state that these conditions are non-negotiable, implying that Zelensky would profit significantly if they were to be accomplished. In a shock to the IMF representatives and the Ukrainian public who are unaware of the extraordinary demands, Holobrodko rejects the deal.
Nine years later, Zelensky—having transformed from a fictional president into Ukraine’s actual leader—finds himself in a remarkably similar situation. This time, the foreign power is U.S. President Donald Trump, who, styling himself as a master dealmaker, has demanded Ukraine repay military and financial aid fivefold, primarily through the exploitation of its vast mineral resources, including lithium, titanium, and rare earth elements. This arrangement would effectively transfer significant control over these critical assets to U.S. interests. When Zelensky rejects the proposal, citing concerns over national sovereignty and the disproportionate repayment terms, Trump responds by publicly mischaracterizing Zelensky as a dictator and suggesting that Ukraine’s leadership is ungrateful for the support received.
The confrontation between the two leaders reveals a stark contrast in how two former entertainers-turned-presidents engage with political reality. For Zelensky, the war has forced a transition from media personality to wartime leader, where abstract political theater gives way to concrete matters of national survival. Trump, however, continues to treat the conflict as another episode in an ongoing reality show1—a narrative to be rewritten, a deal to be negotiated, an image to be managed. Their clash illustrates how the boundaries between media spectacle and geopolitical reality have become increasingly blurred, even as actual lives hang in the balance.
The Media-Construction of Zelensky and Trump
In the current geopolitical environment, it is difficult to position Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky as parallel contemporaries, yet both of them emerged through a similar political roadmap. Both Zelensky and Trump emerged from the world of show business and entertainment. The former crafted his public career through the first ever successful virtual political campaign, and one of the greatest of all time. This campaign intertwined a character shaped to perfectly fit the desired populist narrative with a candidate who promised change and a post-ideological, youthful freedom from the establishment that preceded him. In his campaign, Zelensky explicitly described his campaign strategy as a sort of “reality show.” The latter crafted an executive persona of efficiency and proficient deal-making on The Apprentice, even as his business ventures failed and his personal life was filled with strife and scandal. For both leaders, their media representations didn’t simply reflect their political ambitions; they preceded and shaped the very reality they would later inhabit, exemplifying what French thinker Jean Baudrillard called the “precession of simulacra,” where representations cease to reflect reality and instead create their own self-sustaining truth.2 Their campaigns took advantage of what another French philosopher, Guy Debord, termed the “society of the spectacle,” – where the commodification of reality has allowed social relations to be mediated through images.3 However, the spectacle is not merely media imagery, but a totalizing social condition where lived experience is increasingly mediated by representations. In this society, meaning and reality itself can be shaped and bent to serve the narratives of the ruling elite. As a result, the two leaders operated in what Baudrillard calls the hyperreal world–a society in which the distinction between reality and simulation collapses.
For Trump, his entrepreneur dealmaker persona manifested in promises to “drain the swamp” of Washington corruption and use “common sense” politics. For Zelensky, the vision of an honest and resourceful school teacher materialized into a platform of anti-corruption and youthful efficiency, focused on extensive online media communication. The Ukrainian president’s 2019 campaign emphasized unity over ideology, avoiding divisive issues in favor of a broad, populist appeal. Beyond campaign similarities, Zelensky’s initial approach to Putin was also not so far removed from Trump’s deal-making strategy—“unlike Poroshenko, Zelensky said that he would even be willing to sit down with Putin to bring a halt to the killing.”4 Moreover, for both Trump and Zelensky Debord’s spectacle was not only a campaign tool, but a governing strategy. Trump’s first term revolved around media sensationalism in which policy took a backseat, while Zelensky prioritized optics and a direct, media-savvy approach, throughout his early tenure.
Even today, on a domestic level, Zelensky’s approach to reform has resemblances of modern Trumpism. Shortly after coming to power in 2019 Zelensky faced a problem, he could not make his right-hand man during the campaign, Andriy Bohdan, an official within the Ukrainian political scene. Due to the Ukrainian law on “lustration”, civil servants who worked under Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych for more than a year and did not resign of their own accord between 25 February 2010 and 22 February 2014 are not allowed to take public office. As a result, through a combination of a law from the Poroshenko administration and by renaming the President’s Administration to The Office of The President, the institutional body gained a sort-of semi-autonomy from democratic checks and balances. Over time, Andrii Yermak replaced Bohdan, and during the full-scale invasion he accumulated unprecedented power, with certain lawmakers calling him the “de facto head of state” and many allies expressing concern. Although established in war-time circumstances that arguably can be taken into consideration, Yermak’s operation as a Zelensky loyalist outside the scope of normally granted powers closely mirrors Trump’s approach to governance in his second-term, with personal loyalty and specific individuals superseding the systems established checks and balances.
Spectacle Meets Reality
While these similarities exist, Russia’s full-scale invasion and its implications is a critical divergence between the political journey’s of Zelensky and Trump that defines their current geopolitical conflict. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky—and the country as a whole—has been forced to reckon with a continuous existential threat that has shattered his ability to deny the notion of national categorization as an outdated universal. The confrontation with war stripped away Zelensky’s anti-establishment simulacra, thrusting him into the irreducible stakes of war. Zelensky’s leadership was forced to confront a reality his character President Holoborodko never anticipated—mass graves, bombed cities, war crimes. While Zelensky hasn’t abandoned the mechanisms of spectacle society– indeed, his masterful use of media and global diplomatic performance suggests an intensification of spectacle –the Russian invasion created a rupture in how this spectacle functions. For Ukrainians experiencing the war firsthand, the brutal materiality of the conflict cannot be reduced to mere representation or mediated experience as Debord describes in Society of the Spectacle. The existential stakes of invasion, resistance, and survival pierce through the totalizing nature of spectacle society.
This has forced Zelensky’s leadership into a unique position: while still operating within the realm of global media spectacle for diplomatic purposes, he must simultaneously address the undeniable material conditions of a nation at war. The luxury of treating all reality as mediated representation, a key feature of spectacle society, collapses in the face of immediate physical threat. This creates a hybrid form of leadership where spectacular elements remain but are grounded by concrete wartime imperatives that demand clear moral and tactical distinctions between aggressor and defender. However, this rupture in the spectacle is primarily contained within the sphere of the war itself. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the conflict is still largely experienced through the mediating lens of spectacle that Debord identified, even as the material reality of the war strains against pure representation.
Trump, on the other hand, has continuously been able to maintain the simulacra of his persona and political identity, extending the hyperreality by being reelected for a new political term. As Slavoj Žižek describes it, Trump embodies a paradoxical form of postmodernism—while presenting himself as a defender of traditional values against postmodern permissiveness, his public performance exemplifies what Žižek calls “universalized irony and cynicism.” This self-relativizing stance allows Trump to maintain multiple contradictory positions simultaneously, maintaining his hyperreality by never fully committing to any single truth claim. His words always implicitly include a ‘don’t take it too seriously’ approach that undermines the very statements he’s making. This strategic self-relativization serves as both sword and shield: it allows Trump to make inflammatory statements while simultaneously maintaining plausible deniability, effectively immunizing himself against traditional forms of accountability by constantly destabilizing the very notion of sincere political discourse.
This strategy exemplifies post-truth politics, a condition in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion, personal belief, and spectacle. In the post-truth era, political reality is not evaluated by its factual accuracy but by how effectively it resonates within the media ecosystem. This reality reflects Debord’s analysis of the spectacle as a closed loop of self-referential representation—where images and narratives no longer reflect material reality but instead refer only to other images and narratives, sustaining a world of pure appearance. Trump’s political persona is not dependent on governance, diplomacy, or tangible results; it thrives within a recursive media ecosystem in which his authority is continually reaffirmed by its own representations. His approach to the war in Ukraine mirrors what Baudrillard analyzed during the Gulf War—a war measured not through its real on-the-ground devastation, but “by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space.”5 This attitude from the U.S. President plays directly into the hands of the Kremlin. Their greatest geopolitical enemy only months ago is now actively supporting and regurgitating their own post-truth myths, contributing to the destabilization of Ukraine’s legitimacy as an independent state.
Zelensky’s Challenge
As Baudrillard’s historical insights suggest, Ukraine risks the war becoming nothing more than a media representation on the geopolitical stage, where its real danger and existential importance is manipulated by the narrative around it rather than its material consequences. Trump thrives in this constructed reality, where truth can be bent to his will. However, Zelensky, as both a media figure and a wartime leader, introduces a disruptive force—the materiality of war—that resists full absorption into Trump’s spectacle. On February 19th President Zelensky stated that Trump “lives in a disinformation space.” This simple acknowledgment of Trump’s disinformation dependency provoked an insecure response, momentarily exposing the fragility of Trump’s hyperreal ego. Zelensky’s challenge was a breaking of the reaffirmation of Trump’s own representations, an unwanted disruption in the media ecosystem that he so adamantly desires to control. This is why Trump’s response — calling Zelensky a dictator, and even stating that Ukraine should have come to the negotiations table long ago since they are the ones who started the war–was so volatile. The blatantly false rhetoric clearly demonstrates that to Trump this battle is not just a foreign policy disagreement, but an intrusion of reality into a self-controlled managed world of image. By saying out loud what everyone knows but does not say, Zelensky momentarily destabilized the spectacle, breaking Trump down from a self-created pedestal in which everyone is nothing more than merely his Apprentice.
The Battle Over Global Perception
In Zelensky’s TV show, after rejecting the foreign power’s demands, the Ukrainian public erupts in outrage forcing his character, Holoborodko, to quickly resign. In reality however, the Ukrainian people are far more united than authoritarian leaders of post-truth could ever understand. One of Trump’s greatest skills is his ability to shield himself from a reckoning with the real—best exemplified by his lack of consequences for numerous unlawful actions, both within and beyond the presidency. January 6th stands as the Polaris in this constellation of impunity. However, while Trump can shape perceptions at home, he cannot so easily manipulate the views of the global public, and most importantly, the Ukrainian people. Earlier this week, Trump claimed that Zelensky had a “4% approval rating” as a part of a fiery speech. While throwing unsubstantiated numbers like 4% support is a continuation of his commitment to the simulation of reality, it has thus far only increased the support for Zelensky domestically. Although Ukrainians may not be incredibly sound in domestic political organization, the country’s citizens nonetheless are prolific in rallying against a perceived external aggressor.
Trump, while a master within the United States, has a foundational inability to understand populations that are not contained with his media bubble and do not fit his construct of reality. His pursuit of forcing a deal between Russia and Ukraine is an unprecedented test for his ability to export the hyperreality he has created beyond the bounds of the passive American consumer, to the geopolitical arena which has thus far interpreted the war as far more existential both for Ukraine and Europe as a whole. For Zelensky, the current reality is also a test — a challenge of how well he can utilize his media experience in a battle with another post-ideological figure.To an extent, the former-comedian is confronting his own past political identity taking to the absolute extreme of performative populism, while simultaneously facing an existential threat from the Russian military.
Conclusion: Hyperreality vs Reality
Zelensky’s confrontation with Trump is not only a political dispute but a collision of two different relationships with reality—one grounded in the material consequences of war, the other sustained by spectacle-driven hyperreality. The question is whether Trump’s hyperreality can maintain itself against something as materially significant as Ukraine’s battle against Russian aggression, and if its perception as an abstract narrative can be exported beyond his domestic support base. Unlike most passive consumers of American political spectacle, Ukraine’s allies—Poland, the Baltics, the UK—are confronting a tangible security threat that cannot be reduced to a media construct. This shift in geopolitical relations has opened a second front for Zelensky; he is not only battling a Russian invasion but also resisting the symbolic war of hyperreality waged by one of his country’s most powerful allies.
While post-truth politics has long been a weapon of the Kremlin, Trump’s attempt to impose this hyperreal logic onto the U.S. approach to Ukraine represents an unprecedented shift—not in the use of disinformation itself, but in its application by an American leader in the context of a war where the U.S. has historically positioned itself as the guarantor of reality against Russian manipulation. If Trump succeeds in exporting his spectacle-driven diplomacy onto the conflict, it would signal a transformation in how global power operates—not through material force alone, but through the control of perception itself. But if Ukraine’s struggle resists mediation, it may reaffirm that some events—despite the spectacle’s attempts—cannot be fully reduced to image and performance. In this sense, the war in Ukraine is not just a geopolitical struggle but a battle over whether material reality can push back against the forces of simulation.
Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Ukraine Drills, Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made
- Olga Onuch and Henry E. Hale, The Zelensky Effect (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023),143. ↩︎
- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 18. ↩︎
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014), 2. ↩︎
- Onuch and Hale, The Zelensky Effect, 153. ↩︎
- Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995),56. ↩︎