Before the 2024 vote, Russian newspapers cast Trump as a persecuted fighter; within weeks of his win he had become peacemaker and saviour

How did four pro-government Russian newspapers build Trump's image during the 2024 U.S. election, and how did their narratives and metaphors shift between the campaign and the weeks after the result? The fourth study in a series that has followed the same image since 2016.

Every article about Trump or the election in four national dailies between 1 September 2024 and 20 January 2025: 254 articles, 79 before election day and 175 from the result to the inauguration. Each article was coded in the original Russian as present/absent for narrative frames (victim of persecution, disruptor of the establishment, peacemaker, America-first nationalist, pragmatic businessman, charismatic leader, saviour) and for metaphors (fighter, saviour, deal-maker, showman, rogue), after a pilot of ten articles. Inter-coder agreement (Cohen's kappa) was above .85 for both sets.

• Before the election the dominant picture was a man under attack who would not yield. The victim frame appeared in 47.5% of articles, disruptor 49%, charismatic leader 35.9%, peacemaker 29%, nationalist 27.9%, businessman 24%, saviour 19%. Among metaphors, fighter appeared in 51.5%, deal-maker 37.2%, showman 26.9%, saviour 19%, rogue 5%.
• After the result the picture flipped within weeks. Peacemaker jumped to 63%, saviour to 36.4%, nationalist 35.6%, charismatic leader 35%, while victim fell to 5% and disruptor to 22%. The deal-maker metaphor rose to 64.2%, saviour to 47% and rogue to 37.5%, while fighter dropped to 31% and showman to 12%.
• The peacemaker frame hung on promises to end the war in Ukraine, and the sampled articles did not question whether those promises were feasible. The authors note the frame set aside his hawkish record from the first term.
• The four papers used different registers to deliver one message. The tabloid used populist and religious language (“spared by God”); the business daily used managerial language (“CEO of diplomacy”) and avoided redemptive rhetoric; the politics-focused paper quoted Trump himself at length; the government's paper spoke through expert commentary and diplomatic euphemism.
• The authors read the pivot as serving domestic ideology: Trump as a symbol of a West fracturing from within, and the United States as a “temporarily hijacked superpower” that the right leader might steer back toward interest-based diplomacy.

A simple two-phase design, before and after a result, shows the same outlets rewriting the same person the moment his usefulness changes. Anyone tracking how state-aligned media treat a foreign leader can reuse the seven-frame, five-metaphor code sheet directly: code before and after the event, and the difference is the intended message.