Putin is a “grievously damaged man.” Lucian K. Truscott, IV
You’ve all seen photos of a bare chested Vladimir Putin, whether on a fishing trip or riding a horse. These photos, meant to be seen both in Russia and around the world, were shared through Russian state media. Putting Putin on the psychoanalytic couch (the most famous one in my illustration), it isn’t a stretch to conclude that being seen as a tough “manly man” is personally very important to Putin and a crucial aspect of his self-image. When taken to an extreme these aspects of one’s personality strongly suggest underlying insecurity and self-doubt. When expressing this begins with an emotionally satisfying result but it ends in what may eventually lead to a disaster for an individual this veers into the territory of psychopathology because it is self-destructive.
Consider:
Right now, the greatest danger the world faces from such a leader comes from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The 69-year-old Putin has long been seen as a man so insecure about his fading virility that he has engineered sometimes comical macho displays from ill-considered shots of him riding horseback shirtless through the Russian countryside to hockey games in which his side always wins thanks to a tsunami of goal-scoring by a Gretzky-like Vlad. (From An Aging Vladimir Putin Hopes War Can Make a Sagging Empire Rise Again).
Trump never complained about photoshops of him as Superman. He even floated the idea that he open his shirt for the cameras when he left Walter Reed where he was treated for Covid to reveal a Superman t-shirt underneath. As far as we know he’s never complained about flags like these (Trump on a tank is something Putin might admire):
Lucian K/ Truscott, IV writes about Putin’s motivation for invading Ukraine in “Why Putin will invade: War is the place where logic and reason go to die: There's no sense to Putin's Ukraine misadventure. It's a world-shaping disaster. But it's going to happen anyway:”
But it's not about Russia, and it's not about the Russian people. It's about him.
Everything with Putin is about how he looks. Does he look "strong" and "powerful," or does he look "weak?" You know you're dealing with an authoritarian personality when you hear those words again and again. Anything weak is bad. Anything strong is good.
Truscott concludes:
We dodged a bullet enduring the four-year rule of our own unhinged egomaniacal lunatic. But this time, another grievously damaged man will try to fill the hole in his soul with thousands of dead, the rubble of cities and the broken dreams and bodies of children. It won't work. His war won't fill holes, it will make them.
Trump presents psychologically as a different wrinke of being a narcissist than Putin. However, there are many examples of Trump’s narcissism, perhaps the least of them being that he once complained to the president of NBC News that the network always used unflattering photos of him:
He also complained about photos of himself that NBC used that he found unflattering, the source said.
Trump turned to NBC News President Deborah Turness at one point, the source said, and told her the network won’t run a nice picture of him, instead choosing “this picture of me,” as he made a face with a double chin. Turness replied that they had a “very nice” picture of him on their website at the moment. Politico
Trump can’t control the photos used by the media of him. What with his double chin I am sure he’d like photos highlighting this to be banned.
Perhaps if he is president again and the Republicans control Congress publishing unflattering depictions of Dear Leader, whether in photos or cartoons, might be made a federal crime. We might have a version of Islamic law where instead of banning all images of Muhammad only publishing ugly images of Trump would be a crime.
Daring to go against Putin can be very dangerous and even cost someone their freedom or life as almost murdered and now imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny can tell you. Merely being an influential critic of Putin can get you killed as Alexander Litvinenko can attest and even being in the U.K. is not an assurance of your being safe.
Putin is always intent on conveying the message that even though he is approaching being 70 years old he is still not a person whose wrath you want to incur.
The Poll
When answering the poll consider this from The Washington Post (subscription)
MUNICH — President Biden said Friday that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, had “made the decision” to strike Ukraine — an assessment that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Saturday that he agreed with.
However, high-level European officials said Saturday that they had not been given any direct intelligence or evidence of Putin having made up his mind to attack. “Let me say clearly that at this stage, we do not have such clear intelligence,” one European official told The Washington Post, adding that “it is also clear that the situation is very serious.”
Another European official said, “We have no clear evidence ourselves that Putin has made up his mind, and we have not seen anything that would suggest otherwise,” adding that they believed such strong statements could be part of a U.S. tactic to increase pressure on Russia.