The President’s Body

How power takes shape

Article

June 2026

Before a leader speaks, his body has already spoken. The news is no longer new. We are attached to a drip-feed that keeps administering the same images: Putin, Netanyahu, Orbán, the inescapable Trump. The same images, the same men, the same appearances. But what exactly are we seeing when we look at them?

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text: Daan Heerma van Voss

Strikingly little has been written about the president’s body as a political instrument. One of the few who has examined the subject systematically is the French historian Thomas Snégaroff. In his work, he looks not only at what presidents do, but at how they appear: their posture, presentation, clothing, and above all their body – and what that body is meant to project. He devoted several books to the subject, including L’Amérique dans la peau (2012), as well as a lecture series at Sciences Po. Snégaroff shows that this focus on the body is far from harmless: the obsession with the president’s body is institutionally dangerous and fundamentally unfair, because it places women at a structural disadvantage. More on that later.

In L’Amérique dans la peau, the historian cites the eighteenth-century English jurist Edmund Plowden, who argued that the king has two bodies. There is the ‘natural body’, the physical shell, subject to illness and age, mortal by definition. And then there is the ‘political body’: government, institutions, the state itself. In the 1980s, American political scientist Michael Rogin complicated and updated this two-body model by arguing that the political body also shapes the natural one: the president comes to embody American myths, dreams and values.

That embodiment serves to legitimise presidential power. Kings do not need to legitimise theirs. Historically, European monarchs ruled by droit divin – divine right: they were God’s earthly representatives. Today, hereditary succession functions as legitimacy in itself. The king is the son of the king is the son of the king. Less therefore depends on embodiment: the monarch is self-evident. Modern heads of government – elected prime ministers in consensus democracies – operate differently again: the leader’s body matters less. He represents a compromise and speaks on behalf of the cabinet. For authoritarian leaders – think Putin, and other contemporary tyrants – embodiment is crucial precisely because they are the state. Hence those now historical images of Putin bare-chested on horseback in the wilderness.

The president’s body – and particularly that of the American president, Snégaroff’s main subject – is constantly watched, judged and interpreted: by fellow politicians, by voters, by the media. The president must therefore possess and deploy a certain kind of body, according to Snégaroff. It must project the values of the healthy nation: vitality, stability, moral strength, charisma. George Washington, the very first president, was consistently depicted as a composed, decisive patriarch. In the many iconic portraits made of him, his posture is classical: relaxed shoulders, straight back, chest forward, clear gaze. From an art-historical perspective, one might say that presidential portraiture oscillates between the Greek hero – strength and courage – and the Roman Stoic, defined by self-command. Especially since the rise of the nation-state, these traditionally ‘masculine’ virtues have been linked to the health and strength of the nation.

When a nation or empire lost standing, as the Ottoman Empire did in the nineteenth century, it became ‘the sick man’ of Europe. Something similar is occasionally said of Germany today, in light of its economic stagnation. When a president appears weak or unwell, it is therefore experienced as an existential problem for the nation. The American public watched Joe Biden’s decline with visible discomfort: falling off his bicycle one day, fumbling a speech the next. Much the same applies when a president is assassinated. ‘What died there,’ Snégaroff writes of the murder of John F. Kennedy in 1963, ‘was not a man but an American dream, a phantasm.’ Natural body and political body ended in the same instant. As Bob Dylan sang in his seventeen-minute ballad about the assassination: ‘They killed him once and they killed him twice.’

This is an article from See All This #42, summer 2026. Order the edition here.