Madam President in the Media

In 2024, during the leadup to the presidential election, I was struck by the fact that the "Barbie" movie had decided to cast Issa Rae as President Barbie.  I thought that the depiction of an American President analog being neither a man nor Caucasian seemed pretty novel and inspiring, especially in light of the fact that Kamala Harris had a pretty good shot at actually landing the job.  

So I made a list of all the fictional American presidents that I could find who were women of color.  The list was not very long, and included President Montez and President Talbot from “Veep,” (2012) Marina Peralta from "Falling Skies," (2013) Constance Payton from “State of Affairs,” (2014) Susan Brayden from the Arrowverse TV shows (2016), and Elena Canero-Reed from "Diary of a Future President" (2020).  I couldn't quite count Olivia Pope in “Scandal,” (2012) who is hinted at becoming a future president, but we never see it.  There were a few throwaway lines about Oprah and Michelle Obama being president in alternate universes in some recent science fiction shows.  Oh, and Amanda Waller was president in one of the DC direct-to-video animated movies.

I found it funny at the time that reality might be more progressive than Hollywood on this topic.  The joke used to be that you only saw a black or woman president in apocalyptic disaster movies before the Obama administration.  However, it was sobering to discover that a woman of color being the American president was simply not something that existed, even as a speculative concept, in the mainstream media until the 2010s.  Nearly all the examples listed in the previous paragraph are from television shows. 2023's "Barbie" is the first major film I could find that has a black woman playing a president character in live action, and she's specifically the President of Barbieland.  For the first movie with an explicitly non-white and non-male American president, it looks like the honors go to Viola Davis as action-hero President Danielle Sutton in "G20," an Amazon/MGM action film shot in 2023 and released on Prime video in 2025.  Angela Bassett also played the American president twice last year, in the Netflix miniseries "Zero Day" and later in summer, in "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning."  

It feels like we've had a bumper crop of Madam Presidents lately, perhaps as the result of Harris's nomination in 2024 pushing Hollywood to play catch-up.  Scripts were written then for media that's only reaching our screens now, because production times have increased so much.  I haven't looked into whether the 2016 nomination of Hillary Clinton caused anything similar, but her specter has lingered in the media consciousness.  The Madam Presidents of "The Diplomat" and "The Night Agent" seem very Clinton coded to me.  However, I think it's important to note that there are plenty of white male Presidents around, and they remain the default.  White male actors like Harrison Ford, John Cena, and James Marsden are still more likely to be cast as the American president in 2025 than anyone else.

I can't help wondering if Kamala Harris's election chances were influenced by this.  Actually, scratch that.  I know they were influenced by this.  If the images of black and Asian women presidents were so negligible before now in fiction, can it be a surprise that so many rejected the possibility in reality?  There weren't many fictional African-American presidents before Barack Obama was elected, but there's every indication that characters like President David Palmer on "24" reflected a willingness to at least entertain the notion, and having positive, visible examples may have even helped the American public to consider a non-white POTUS more seriously.  Similarly, fictional female presidents were around long before Hilary Clinton got the Democratic nomination in 2016, but they were overwhelmingly white women.  

We tell kids that anyone born in America could grow up to be president, but our media reveals that we think otherwise.  I'm using Kamala Harris as an example here, but she's far from the only one with an identity that doesn't fit the existing image of the American President.  Alexandra Ocasio Cortez doesn't.  Andy Kim doesn't.  Pete Buttigieg  doesn't - I couldn't find any fictional gay presidents who were comfortably out of the closet from before 2025.  This was never on purpose, of course, but as with so many things, Hollywood could do better.  

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