Saturday Night Live: James Austin Johnson is new Donald Trump
Ultimately, when we heard Jeanine Pirro introducing Trump in the sketch at the start of the show, we actually thought that it would be Baldwin who was coming out. Yet, in the wake of the tragedy on the set of Rust, that just didn’t feel right.
Instead of relying on another big name to come in and play the former President, SNL went for an in-house approach. Johnson recently played Joe Biden and now, he’s taken on Trump, as well. While the Alec impression was perhaps goofier, Johnson completely nailed the voice and the cadence. He actually sounded almost identical to Trump to the point that it was disarming.
What made this impersonation work so well was the 60-second timer, a new bit where Johnson’s Trump rambles on incoherently while hitting a number of weird topics. This almost felt like a brief episode of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption but with conspiracy theories and headlines left and right. Eventually, he got back to the subject at hand (Glenn Youngkin), at least to a certain extent.
We don’t mean this at all as some sort of insult to Baldwin, but we hope the show continues to have someone new like Johnson in this role should they revisit it. Alec’s impression got a little tired over time and honestly, we don’t know if anything else could be done with it. Also, it just makes sense for impressions to evolve over time. It’s SNL tradition for multiple cast members to impersonate people through the years.
Ultimately, Trump isn’t in the headlines as much as he once was, so we’re not sure how often we’ll see him.
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