Anthony Atamanuik Breaks Down the Three Modes of Donald Trump

-For those who haven't watched,
and you really should immediately
you play President Trump hosting a talk show.
-Yes. Yes.
-And my dear friend, your dear friend, Pete Grosz,
plays Vice President Pence as sort of a sidekick.
-The great. Yeah, he's incredible as Pence.
-And this is very exciting. How did it come about?
You had this impression. -Yeah.
-And then how did you decide you wanted to do it as a talk show?
-Well, I had done it at UCB, at Upright Citizens Brigade.
-And how did it happen the first time, like,
that you realized you had a Trump impression?
-We were in ASCAP, and someone said "Mr. President,"
and I walked out, and it was two months after he announced,
so I thought it would be funny.
And it was probably very poor.
I think I sort of was like, "Yes, and..."
Like, I didn't do anything great.
And someone said, "You should do a show."
And so I wrote it in seven days.
And the core material for that ended up being sort of
the touring piece I did with James Adomian
where he played Bernie.
-He did a wonderful Bernie sanders, yeah.
-"Trump vs. Bernie."
And then, once he got elected,
after I went into hiding for three weeks and was like,
"I can't believe I'm now trapped in this sort of like
Faustian bargain with doing this,"
I thought, "Well, he always wanted to do TV."
I think that's the reason he ran
was to renegotiate "The Apprentice."
-I agree. -I really do.
I think it was to renegotiate,
and I think he then got stuck in it and was like,
"Oh, no, I got to do this." [ Laughter ]
And so I said, "What would he do if he did fireside chats?"
And I thought of that scene when De Niro, in "Casino,"
he can't work at the casino anymore
and they cut to him hosting that, like,
awful talk show from the casino.
And I said, "That's what he would do."
-Yeah. Just an awful talk show.
-An awful talk show.
-And you -- -But it's a great talk show!
-Yes. It's a great comic talk show.
You have said this about yourself,
that you feel a little bit like
Dustin Hoffman in the film "Tootsie,"
where he was an actor who couldn't get work
until he sort of dressed up as a completely different character.
Is that the case for you?
-Yes, I actually was not being able to get --
I couldn't get a commercial.
I found out someone took my role in "Iceman Cometh."
And so I ran across the street
in a hip, "running across the street" New York move,
and then yelled at my agent and then got -- no.
And so I -- Yeah, I'm a redhead.
-But it's so funny, because that would be
what Donald Trump would say is that, if you embody him,
success will come, and that happened for you.
-It is kind of frightening, when you think about it.
-Yeah. [ Laughter ]
-It is. There's a very sort of weird --
I mean, doing Trump is like doing a drag act.
Like, it is.
Like, someone handed me photos backstage
from a live piece I did.
And, like, it is --
I, like, learned myself how to do the makeup.
It's very like a sad French film, like, me in the...
doing the makeup and, like, putting the hair on.
And I thought about the fact that he actually has to do that
and he can't pull the skin off. -Yeah.
-He's stuck inside who he is.
-He's just fully stuck in this thing he's created.
-Yeah. -You've said this.
You sort of have three modes of your Trump impression.
And it is -- I mean, it really is
so truly the most nuanced of the Trump impressions.
-Thank you.
-And it's really beautiful to behold.
How would you describe the three modes?
-Well, I think that there is -- there's prompter mode.
And I learned a new thing of why he hates the prompter.
And I realize that, when he stands at the podium
and he has to go prompter to prompter,
he shrugs like a kid in school.
He's like... [ Sighs ]
And then he reads --
Watch. The next time, watch him.
He goes [sighs] like that.
So prompter mode is like, you know, "Good night, Moon.
Good night, cat.
Good night, baby with a rat."
Like it's very, like -- he doesn't have any --
He's like the Brown Reading Group.
Then -- [ Laughter ]
Then there's press-conference Trump, which was today.
-Yeah. -Which was just -- I mean...
-It was really --
It was the most press-conference Trump.
-Well, he uses that "Excuse me" like Excalibur.
He's like, "Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me,
excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me."
[ Laughter, cheers, applause ]
But he whispers -- he whispers, actually, a lot in those.
Like, rally Trump, he'll do, like --
What he said today, he's like,
"But the Nazis, they had a permit.
They had a permit. They had a permit.
The left didn't have a permit, but the Nazis had a permit."
And that's all Nazis need, apparently.
-Yeah, exactly.
-You know, Nazis are very organized,
so of course they had a permit. [ Laughter ]
I think there are probably people in municipal government
that office mates say, "That one's a real permit Nazi."
So it, like, completely goes together.
-And meanwhile, the guy's holding a torch,
and he's like, "You don't know the half of it."
[ Laughter ]

Anthony Atamanuik Breaks Down the Three Modes of Donald Trump

Latest Posts