If you want to know what’s going on inside Donald Trump—and who doesn’t, these days?—you have to ask Halina Danchenko. Danchenko was born one month after President Trump, to a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, and has lived in the United States since the age of three. For the past eighteen years, during what was supposed to be her retirement, she has run a small business importing Russian goods to the United States. That’s unusual. The U.S. buys so little from Russia, other than petroleum, that most people are hard pressed to name any Russian imports. Vodka? Kalashnikovs? Pussy Riot? As it happens, though, Danchenko sells one of the few items that almost every American recognizes as Russian: matryoshka dolls, hundreds upon hundreds of them, all made, like her, in Russia and Ukraine. Visitors to her shop are kindly requested not to open any of the nesting dolls by themselves, an injunction that extends to the four sets in the current stock depicting Donald Trump. If you want to see what’s inside the leader of the free world, Danchenko will open him for you.
Among doll varieties, it is the marionette, not the matryoshka, that is most often deployed as a political metaphor. “Puppet,” you will recall, was how Hillary Clinton described Donald Trump during the second Presidential debate, and cartoonists love to draw elected officials dangling from strings. Yet of all the toys and tchotchkes ever pressed into the service of portraying world leaders, none is better suited to our current Commander-in-Chief than the Russian doll. For one thing, it is Russian. For another, it comes in a series, like so many matters pertaining to Trump: marriages, bankruptcies, lawsuits, leaks. For a third, it shares his body type. “Matryoshka” is the diminutive of the Russian name “Matronya”; it means, roughly, “Little Matron.” Trump, who is as matronly as a big bullying man can be, already has the de-facto physique of a nesting doll (and something very like the shellac). With all due respect to Alec Baldwin, a Ukrainian peasant woman could play the President, to great effect, on “Saturday Night Live.” Conversely, given a head scarf and a hen, he could play her.
Nesting dolls have always been concentric and portly, but they have not always been Russian. Danchenko, who is generous and encyclopedic on the subject of her chosen wares, likes to inform customers that the earliest of such dolls were produced in Japan. In the late nineteenth century, one of these made its way to Moscow, where it inspired two toymakers to design a homegrown version. (One did the lathing, the other the painting.) Despite the popular image, that first matryoshka doll was not made of identically painted forms of diminishing size. Instead, like a dinner party organized by Emily Post, it alternated boy-girl, beginning with a stout young peasant woman and concluding, seven dolls later, with a tiny bediapered baby boy. Nowadays, many matryoshka dolls (especially those that are mass-produced in factories) do consist of identical parts, while others are constructed more along the lines of a turducken. The majority are made in the town of Sergiev Posad, which, accordingly, enjoys a reputation as the matryoshka capital of the world.
The matryoshka capital of the United States, however, appears to be the town of Hughsonville, in the Hudson Valley, where Danchenko lives and works. She and her husband, Frank Bishop, are both retired public-school teachers. She taught high-school Russian, back when the Cold War was causing a surge in Slavic studies; he taught high-school physics. On the side, he made wicker furniture and baskets, and sold them out of a big converted barn adjacent to their home. When the time came to retire, he suggested a trip to the Caribbean; she counter-offered with a Russian-doll emporium. They painted the barn hot pink and highlighter green, and emblazoned the word “NESTING” on it in huge letters. (The “DOLL” part is there, too, but seems to have been something of an afterthought.) About all that remains of the shop’s previous incarnation are two wicker chairs behind the cash register—Bishop can often be found occupying one while his wife helps customers—and, in the back, a life-size woven replica of the coffin of King Tut. Bishop walked me back to see it with evident pride: a casket basket. He made it himself, he informed me, and intends to be cremated in it. Until then, he is putting his crafting skills to work sewing the cloth cinch bags, in sizes small, medium, and large, that Danchenko uses to package her customers’ purchases.
Even for a New Yorker, inured to the trend of single-item stores (meatballs, rubber stamps, rice pudding), Danchenko’s shop is wonderfully strange. Inside, it looks less like a place of business than like your great-aunt’s house, after she came into a small fortune and spent it all expanding her collection of Hummel figurines. The distinction, of course, is that matryoshka dolls are more colorful; on this front, the store’s most likely rival would be a piñata shop. The largest and most elaborate dolls fill the highest shelves (and are out of reach in the other sense, too; the priciest ones will set you back nearly two thousand dollars), while medium-sized dolls fill the lower shelves, small ones crowd display tables, and tiny ones overflow from baskets and cabinets.
Exactly how many dolls this amounts to is unclear. Danchenko reckons it to be in the hundreds and her husband thinks that it’s in the thousands, but neither has ever made an inventory. (The question is further complicated by an inherent uncertainty concerning the tabulating of Russian dolls: does a doll with nine littler dolls inside it count as one doll or as ten?) All told, it is easier to assess them qualitatively. Some of the more traditional dolls are genuinely lovely, edged with silver and gold leaf and impressively detailed, reminiscent less of Raggedy Ann than Fra Angelico. Yet even at the most beautiful end of its considerable spectrum, the matryoshka doll is hopelessly constrained by being a matryoshka doll; it is destined by its shape to contend forever with dumpiness.
And the beautiful end of the spectrum, it must be said, does not dominate these days. Somewhere along the line, thanks partly to matryoshka artists gone rogue and partly to Communism gone soft, variations on the happy peasant family gave way to wider, weirder forms. Some dolls in Danchenko’s shop now focus on professions: there are sets of cosmonauts (very Russian), sets of ballerinas (plausibly Russian), and sets of cowboys (not Russian at all). Others depict historical figures or celebrities, from Shakespeare to Santa Claus, including an entire shelf of popular musicians: the Beatles, Bob Marley, Britney Spears, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Kurt Cobain, Eminem. Some matryoshka makers simply give up on people, opting instead for other animals (owls, penguins, koalas, elephants, pandas, parrots, cobras) or for fantastical beings, all of them the products of distinctly capitalist imaginations: Harry Potter, SpongeBob SquarePants, and whatever the blue guy from “Avatar” was called, plus every single Disney princess. Others go even further and abandon life forms entirely. There are matryoshka lighthouses, matryoshka Manhattans, and matryoshka famous paintings, mostly of the kind already threatened with banality by replication across ten thousand dorm rooms (Dalí’s watches, Kahlo’s self-portrait, Klimt’s kiss), here further humbled by rotundity.
And then, of course, there are the political figures. Trump is by no means the first of these to get, as it were, dolled up. You can buy matryoshkas of Russian leaders, going all the way back to Nicholas II (who opens up to reveal his whole family hiding inside, including a tiny Anastasia and Alexei), and foreign politicians are at least as popular. Danchenko’s collection includes, among others, Queen Elizabeth II, Barack Obama, Silvio Berlusconi, and Saddam Hussein—who holds, disturbingly, a canister of chemical weapons.
But these days, for obvious reasons, it is the dolls representing our current President that command the most attention. One of these distills the fears of many Americans, which is to say that it consists of five consecutive Trumps. The outermost one wears a red tie and a wide grin, and holds an unhappy-looking elephant; behind him, in an image that could launch a thousand semiotics dissertations, Vice-President Mike Pence straddles the elephant backward, carrying a fire extinguisher. Inside that doll, an angry Trump brandishes an automatic weapon next to a sign decrying the so-called War on Coal, and, inside that one, the President is bricking himself into a wall labelled (in upside-down letters) “Law and Order.” In the next-to-last figure in the series, Trump sports his distinctive scrunch-face, like a man learning how to pronounce French vowels, and carries a piggy bank that says “Made in China.” The final and smallest Trump waves a sign that says “Americanism, not Globalism,” while cradling two tiny Twitter birds.
Unlike regular dolls, matryoshka dolls do not suffer from a reputation for being creepy—even though, when you stop to think about it, they are disturbing verging on perverse. Are we to understand that Cinderella is pregnant with Snow White? Why, when you open George W. Bush, do you find his father lurking inside? Russian dolls don’t have an uncanny valley; they have an uncanny cave. Consider, for instance, another one of the Trump dolls in Danchenko’s store: Trump the family man, which opens to reveal Melania; Donald, Jr.; Ivanka; Eric; and Barron. (Tiffany, perhaps to her relief, is nowhere to be found.) There is also Trump the primary candidate, featuring the 2016 G.O.P. slate, and Trump the President, featuring a “Make America Great Again” banner and four previous Republican leaders stuck inside. Any of these sets can be yours for forty-nine dollars. None of them, it is safe to say, will be requisitioned by the National Portrait Gallery anytime soon.
Ultimately, though, the questionable artistry doesn’t matter much; the form feels right no matter how you paint it. Never has a President seemed so entirely hollow as Trump, so intellectually and morally vacant. Nor has any Administration, so early in its tenure, concealed such a lengthy series of deceptions, or grown so bizarrely, fatally fractal: its lawyers have lawyers, its scandals have sub-scandals, its lies have little lie-lets. It’s easy to imagine, given this prevailing opacity and the incompetence of those nominally in charge, that there is another Trump Russian doll out there, this one filled up with actual Russians.
That might or might not prove to be the truth about what’s going on inside Donald Trump politically. What’s going on psychologically is a different story. All of us are largely hidden from one another, our most important attributes by definition invisible: minds, hearts, psyches, consciences, souls. Even for ourselves, we can access these aspects only through sustained introspection, a habit anathema to Trump; other people, meanwhile, reveal their innermost selves to us chiefly through their actions. On that evidence, the most accurate Trump doll is the one made of Donalds all the way down: utterly full of himself, in all other ways utterly empty.
