It took until he was out of the White House, but SNL finally found its Donald Trump in James Austin Johnson. The comedian, who became a viral star for his freakishly accurate impression of the former-president’s stream-of-consciousness monologues (he also gave us one of the greatest tweets of all-time), was added to the sketch show before season 47, and made an immediate splash. On Monday’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, Johnson shared his process behind nailing Trump’s particular way of speaking.
“The first times that I tried doing the Trump, it just sort of reflected my liberal black-sheep anger. I mean, ‘We’re gonna kill everybody.’ I was saying stuff that no one wanted to hear, or I’d say things he actually said. And I just remember the audience always yanking back, especially as I got the voice,” he said. “As I started sounding like him, and then I would just say horrific things, people hated it.” So Johnson tried a different tactic.
“At some point, I realized, ‘Oh, the stuff that he’s talking about, we got over hundreds of years ago.’ He’s bringing up these issues that we don’t even think about anymore, so that’s when I started abstracting him. I made him like a guy talking about the wizard on the hill,” he explained before launching into an impression of Trump rambling about dragons, swords, and amulets. “And that’s when I started getting the laughs with it.”
There’s also talk of “weird throat noises.”
"Let's get today's Wordle, could we do that please" – Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/eUY25MYmKY
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) January 23, 2022
You can watch the Late Night clip above.
