Kline plays Dave Kovic, world health organization diarrhethe a irregular employment office within Washington, D.C. As a sideline, he makes public and private appearances impersonating President William Harrison "Bill" Mitchell, whom he greatly resembles (and who, of course, is also played by Kline). Mitchell's Chief of Staff, Bob Alexander (Frank Langella), hires Kovic to make an exit at an appearance of President Mitchell, to handle higher an extramarital affair that Mitchell is having.

Once the very President Mitchell suffers the stroke during said affair that leaves him within the coma, Bob Alexander sees an chance. Along sustaining Communications Director Alan Reed (Kevin Dunn), Alexander arranges for the stroke to be saved secret. It so con Kovic into impersonating a president in an on-going basis by telling him that a united states would suffer whenever the truth was revealed or even in case Vice President Gary Nance (Ben Kingsley), who it say is mad, took professional.

a rattling idea, course, is that Alexander may today exercise the power of the presidency across Kovic as a soft touch. However instead Kovic spurns Alexander's control & sets his have course, which revives Mitchell's popularity by using a public, & mystifies two a Wash. media & First Lady Ellen Mitchell (Sigourney Weaver). Kovic comes to understand that Nance international relations and security network't harebrained, however just has different political ideas than Alexander. He besides is studied to Ellen, whom he has to convince to mill around sequentially to maintain a artifice.

One of these days Bob Alexander involved the scandal that implicates Mitchell. Inside the joint session of Congress, Kovic, as Mitchell, admits to his role in a scandal, however will bring grounds to believe proving that Alexander was the mastermind. Kovic so fakes a stroke & is switched back by using the however-comatose Mitchell. Mitchell is so stated incompetent person under a Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, eventually dies, & Nance will require professional.

In the moving picture's final scene, Kovic is going his have campaign for city council; Ellen Mitchell comes into a professional & kisses him.

Numbers of political and entertainment personalities have cameos in the film as themselves, notably Oliver Stone, who expresses the conspiracy theory that is in fact right. It too features two or three segments of The McLaughlin Group created specifically for the movie.

A story draws from either such tales when Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda, Robert A. Heinlein's Double Star, Moon Over Parador starring Richard Dreyfuss and The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas.