Sarah Cooper Imitating Trump

nytimes

When   Sarah   Cooper   lip-syncs Donald   Trump’s   news conferences, there’s no lectern or presidential seal. There’s no Mike Pence, face calibrated to Placid Gratitude as he gazes beatifically into the middle distance, and no Dr. Anthony Fauci, looking as though he’d give anything to be transported someplace better, like maybe Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” No, in   Cooper’s   version there’s just   Cooper , posting videos online, usually from her own apartment, miming along to the president’s characteristic rasp — part pontificating doorman, part tepid Marlon Brando impersonation, grasping from one excuse to another, one enemy to another, one wrecking ball to another.

Cooper   is a black Jamaican immigrant, an erstwhile Google designer, a writer and a comedian.   She   looks nothing like   Trump   and suffers no pains to make herself physically Trumpian. He’s white,   she ’s black; he’s orange,   she ’s tan;   she ’s easily half his Taftian size. What   she   portrays is not his persona but his affect: the glib overconfidence, the lip curl of dismissiveness, the slow nods of fake understanding.   She   uses jump cuts and darting eyes to capture the rate at which   Trump   leaps from one topic to another — midsentence, midthought, sometimes midsyllable. In “How to Very Positively,” her expressions chase her train of thought as we hear   Trump , asked about his coronavirus test, stumbling over his own allergic reaction to admitting anything “negative”: “I tested very positively in a, in another sense, so, this morning, yeah — I tested positively toward negative, right? So, no, I tested, ah, perfectly this morning — meaning, I tested negative.”

Or there’s “How to the Black People,” featuring   Trump’s   response to the death of George Floyd: a rush to reassure the 8 percent of African-American voters who helped elect   him   that his base loves their race. “MAGA is ‘Make America Great Again,’” he says — and “by the way, they love   African-American   people.” The president is unable to resist using the vocal equivalent of jazz hands when saying the words “African-American,” and   Cooper   captures this minstrelizing perfectly, zigzagging her way through   Trump’s   phrasing as if it were a sax solo. Then it’s back to hollow reassurances: “They love black people. MAGA. Loves. The black people.”

Trump   impersonators usually try to capture his goofiness (Alec Baldwin), his air-headed frivolity (Stephen Colbert) or his smarmy lasciviousness (Anthony Atamanuik). They fall into the trap of having to imitate the very qualities that make the president appealing to some people, exaggerating them until his base sees only the mockery, not what’s being mocked. But   Cooper   doesn’t   seem interested in embodying or mimicking   Trump .   She ’s all about   exposing   him , in the most literal sense — and exposing, along with   him , all the props, bluster and stagecraft he has cultivated for years. What would it be like, her videos ask, if you could take away everything else — all the trappings of authority, the partisan resentments, the sorcery of the performance — and leave only what   Trump   is literally saying? This, more often than not, is what   she   foregrounds. When the president asks aloud whether “injection inside or almost a cleaning” with disinfectants might help treat Covid-19,   she   grabs a bottle of Mrs. Meyer’s and pretends to spritz her eyes. When he touts hydroxychloroquine by saying, “I want the people of this nation to feel good,”   she   slips pills from an inside jacket pocket like a 1970s drug pusher.

There is an “I don’t see color” crowd that might say   Cooper’s   ethnicity and gender aren’t part of why these videos have become hugely popular online. But most surely recognize that when   Trump’s   words come from a different mouth, we approach a sort of reckoning. A black woman — no matter her obvious intelligence, her hip affect or cool apartment — could never get away with talking like this.   She   channels the entitlement of someone accustomed to bluffing their way out of speeding tickets, blustering through corporate presentations, excuse-mongering a way out of kids’ birthdays and partners’ anniversaries — the guy at the end of the bar whose expert opinion always begins with ignoring the experts.

Trump   was “able to become the most powerful man in the world on posture alone,”   Cooper   told Lawrence O’Donnell during a TV appearance last month. But her videos “take away the podium and the people behind   him   nodding and the suit and the ‘I’m so rich’ and just have the words there with my facial expression — so people can actually see how he literally has no clue what he’s talking about.”

Here we arrive   at the part that’s less funny. If   Trump   won the presidency on posture alone, and has occupied it without magically becoming more “presidential,” then what are we left with but posturing? When the coronavirus appeared, the president repeatedly said it would simply go away. When its threat grew, he held a rally and dismissed criticism of his response as the Democrats’ “new hoax.” When it became a crisis, he held news conferences that managed to look like a coronavirus-task-force version of “America’s Got Talent.” (But of course this is not a show; it is people’s lives.) Then came the killing of George Floyd, which sparked protests nationwide and an overdue conversation on systemic racism. Yet the president proved incapable of replacing his strongman fantasies with any call for unity, reconciliation or reform. “Once the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, borrowing an old segregationist rhyme. “You have to dominate the streets,” he warned governors, chastising them for being “weak” — even as he himself was briefly sequestered in the White House’s underground bunker.

Cooper   plays a paranoid   Trump   in “How to Bunker,” hiding behind walls as   Trump   says, “I was there for a tiny — little short period of time, and it was much more for an inspection.”   She   fondles a shower curtain the way   Trump   often caresses the flag, but it’s when   she   peeks from behind it that you may be reminded of “The Wizard of Oz” — the moment when Dorothy’s dog, Toto, pulls back a curtain, revealing that there is no wizard, only a showman working the machinery behind the booming voice and orange flames.

This is what all of   Cooper’s   videos portray: a one-man show in which the man is mired in an image of his own making. Most leaders — even the showmen, cynics and opportunists — would have recognized the seismic events of the past months as an opportunity to remind citizens of their special place in history. A hustler must still put in the work of hustling, and even tyrants require a dash of vision and imagination.   Trump   seems unencumbered by either.   Cooper’s   version of   him   is so suffused in every variety of American privilege that he   doesn’t   have to show us   anything .

I think I'll watch this again.  And again.  And again.

She takes what are basically vacant thoughts and gives them the window dressing of animated facial expressions, which only moreso exposes the words meaninglessness.