@blissweb 1 January 2021 more from that month

The Donald Trump impression flourished in the final year of his term, and its most inventive practitioners explored opposite tacks. Sarah Cooper, a comedian and former employee at Google, shot to fame with the TikTok video “How to medical,” in which she lip-synched the audio from one of Trump’s April press conferences, during which he suggested injections of disinfectant to kill the virus. By severing Trump’s words from his person and linking them instead to her own inspired physical comedy, Cooper captured something new about the President’s petulant idiocy. The L.A.-based comedian James Austin Johnson, meanwhile, went another way, using his own voice to nail the cadence and nonsense of Trump’s delivery, but applying it to absurd subjects like Scooby-Doo and Pokémon. In videos shot selfie-style on his phone, Johnson’s impression is uncanny in the eyes and lips, and he takes Trump’s obsessive, grudge-filled, free-associative style on a journey into the ridiculous. “We call him Scooby, but he doesn’t do,” Johnson says, in an imagined Trump monologue about the cartoon character’s shortcomings. “It’s a terrible deal.”