From Orban to Correa, Modi to Erdogan, personalistic leadership has emerged in a variety of contexts over the last two decades. Unsurprisingly, personalization of politics coincides with the global rise of populism and is often followed by democratic breakdown as incumbents consolidate power to secure their tenure. The exclusionary aspect of populist politics in particular facilitates a Manichean conflict between Us and Them, legitimizing an “authentic” Ingroup while vilifying and thus delegitimizing various Outgroups. The evocation of Us vs. Them themes in constructing personality cults around populist leaders augments their ability to claim rightful rule, deter would-be challengers, and legitimize crackdowns on vilified others who do pose challenges. While there is a prolific literature on regime personalization and personalistic politics in cases of classically defined (full) autocracies, such as the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, Libya’s Qaddafi, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, and North Korea’s Kim dynasty, studies of personalistic leadership in competitive authoritarian regimes are adding nuance to this literature as cases of populist autocrats continue to emerge around the globe. This burgeoning political science literature, however, largely overlooks key media-based strategies these incumbents employ to position themselves as rightful and necessary representative of the Ingroup in the face of Outgroup challengers. Our paper fills this void by turning the spotlight on the production components of personality cult construction. Using a novel dataset comprised of more than 11,000 videos shared via ruling party and state YouTube channels in Turkey between 2002-2022, we first unpack how populists’ personality cults are produced by identifying the specific audiovisual production and social media dissemination techniques. We then unpack the what and the who, using intertextual analysis of selected video content to extract complex and seemingly contradictory themes that position Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as (Strong)Man of the People: the rightful, and glorious leader of contemporary Turkey.