In the Sophist, the Eleatic visitor distinguishes between precise and belief mimicry as having versus lacking knowledge of what one is imitating. Imitation is an important theme in the Statesman as well, where the visitor follows up with a portrait of the true statesman. But the earlier distinction is conspicuously missing in this conversation. My objective here is to analyze political mimesis from the perspective of precise and belief mimicry. I identify the king, who rules with opinion and according to laws, as a potential precise mimic of the true statesman. As such, he occupies a liminal position between sophistry and the demanding true statesman ideal and comes to represent a more realistic political vision on the part of the visitor. The mimetic king does not have direct knowledge in statesmanship, which seems almost impossible to attain, but a second order knowledge of someone who has expertise. He knows the true statesman’s character and manner of rule and is therefore able to imitate this ideal precisely. Since the other mimetic rulers lack this knowledge, they produce merely artificial images of true statesmen. Hence, I argue that, of all the mimetic rulers in the Statesman, only the king is faking it right.