Sarah Cooper Takes the Words Right Out of Donald Trump’s Mouth

Donald Trump is hard to listen to. That was true even before he was elected president of the United States, but the power he commands now makes hearing from him that much more agonizing.

At press conferences and rallies, his words tumble out in a furious clutter. Some of it is hateful and frightening. Some of it is incomprehensible, which is alarming for its own reasons. When he submits to interviews, even well-prepared journalists like Leslie Stahl and Chris Wallace look somewhat agog. He said what?

The problem is also his voice. The novelist Lorrie Moore has insisted that it “has music,” but I hear the record skipping. His voice sounds pinched and abrasive, even grating. It sounds condescending. It sounds familiar to women who have been talked over in meetings.

So it comes as a surprise to those of us who once preferred not to listen to it for extended periods of time that that voice has begun to inspire a different reaction—not despair or rage but laughter.

For the past several months, comedian and actor Sarah Cooper has been posting videos to TikTok and Twitter in which she impersonates the president. The imitations set her apart from those who’ve mocked Trump in the past. Unlike Alec Baldwin, who crowned his famous impressions with a flaxen helmet, she makes no effort to look like him. Unlike Stephen Colbert, who has at this point caricatured most members of the Trump clan, she doesn’t even attempt to sound like him.

In truth it isn’t fair to write that Cooper mimics Trump when what she does so well is pantomime him. While his voice rambles on in her videos, Cooper moves her own lips with frightening precision. The result feels like watching the social media era’s first silent film star. The bluster and performance are the point.

As Z.Z. Packer wrote in the New York Times, what Cooper brings to life is not Trump’s “persona but his affect: the glib overconfidence, the lip curl of dismissiveness, the slow nods of fake understanding.” Stripped of the trappings that lend Trump credence—the pomp and circumstance, the presidential seal, the blank smiles of the blond white people who flank him—Cooper exposes his fraud.

“I didn’t set out to be a Trump impressionist at all,” Cooper says. “It wasn’t that I wanted to be Trump. It’s that I was asking, ‘What if Trump was me?’”

Cooper is a Black woman, a former Google staffer, and the mastermind behind a book titled How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings. She didn’t want to be like Trump so much as she wanted to experiment with him. What if she tried to pull off his con? What if she repeated his words and people around her didn’t shut her up, but just nodded and smiled?

“What if,” as she puts it, “I could pretend to be the smartest person in the room, just bullshitting through life?”

In a world in which women are socialized to accommodate other people’s expectations and emotions, it was an appealing proposition. And for Cooper, the videos became a social experiment: “As a Black woman, could I just sit there and act like that?”

Cooper—who was born in Jamaica and moved to the United States as a child—knows the bias that creeps in, holding someone who looks like her to a higher standard than someone who looks like the president. She wanted her audience to consider how a man who speaks like he does could get so far.

In a sense, her work is a taunt: If it had been Sarah Cooper who had made those speeches, lied on that weather map, proved unable to finish her sentences, and proposed that the American people inject themselves with bleach to kill a virus, she would not be president. She knows it. So do we.

Cooper’s most-loved videos immortalize Trump at his most absurd. There was of course the time his speculative coronavirus treatment involved swallowing disinfectants, but also the time he boasted that a million people wanted to show up to one of his rallies (just 6,200 people attended) or when he bragged about taking a cognitive test that later reporting revealed involved asking him to pick an elephant out of an animal lineup.

The clips take Cooper between 10 minutes and five hours to film—although she is the first to admit that her methods are bare-bones. (“Somebody wrote to me and said, ‘Is there a huge team of people making this look really low-production quality?’ I was like, ‘No, this just is really low-production quality.’”)

In each, she wears the same blazer, and props are minimal. No one else even appears onscreen. If she wants to capture a horrified reaction to whatever wild statement Trump is making, she replaces the jacket with some other garment, switches up her hair, and channels that person too. Sometimes it’s a disturbed aide or a reporter. Most of the time it’s a stand-in for us, wincing.

Cooper grew up telling jokes, eager to make people laugh. She cast herself as the class clown, devising skits and punctuating awkward silences with an acerbic humor. Did it work? She isn’t sure. Despite her 1.9 million followers on Twitter and her now cemented international acclaim, she remains unconvinced of her talents. “Let’s be clear,” she says. “I still question that. People are like, ‘How did you get so funny?’ And I’m like, ‘Wait, am I funny?’”

The doubt seems ridiculous, but Cooper struggled in stand-up for decades and took her job at Google because she was $20,000 in debt. She didn’t earn a check as a comedian until 2016, when her book 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings was released. The satirical how-to guide extolled the virtues of pacing and nodding to “own the room” and advised readers on how to listen to coworkers while also tuning them out. It was published on October 4, a month before a man who seemed to have taken all of its lessons to heart was elected president.

Cooper still feels the book didn’t get as much attention as it might have, drowned out in the pre-election tumult. And after Trump was inaugurated, she spent a lot of time feeling furious. So much of her ire appeared on Twitter—aimed in his direction—that Trump blocked her in 2017.

Because she can’t appear on his timeline, she used to wonder whether Trump had seen her impressions. At first, she theorized that he hadn’t. Then she decided he had seen them but was so taken with the sound of his own voice that he didn’t realize that she was making fun of him. Now she thinks his team has grasped she’s not a fan and no one wants to break the news to him.

She knows that people in his orbit are watching, though, or at least that people who report on him are. She sees it in their retweets, and she hears from them too. She got a message from a White House correspondent who told her how hard it was to express “how preposterous Trump sounds,” she recalls. “For some reason when I do it, it just shows that he is lost and he is contradicting himself.”

Despite the sheer number of hours she spends with his voice, Cooper swears she does not hear Trump in her head. But she has spent so much time listening to him that she’s developed predictive instincts. She saw a clip of someone asking Trump when the next stimulus bill would be passed, and she just knew: “I was like, ‘He’s going to answer, “In a few weeks’” because that’s what he always does. And he did! He was like, ‘Yeah, it will be in a few weeks.’”

His characteristic avoidance, coupled with a vague promise that something will happen in some indefinite period to fix something that he swears isn’t his fault—“it’s his go-to,” Cooper says. “And I just want people to see it; I really do. I think that that’s part of why I do this because I want people to see how there’s nothing else going on there. It’s just him trying to fool us into thinking he knows what he’s doing. That’s all it is.”

The impulse is of course not unique to him. A few weeks before our interview, someone described what Cooper does to her as “reverse mansplaining,” and the term has stuck with her. “Men don’t see themselves sometimes, you know? And I can let them see themselves,” she says. “I can be like, ‘This is what you sound like. This is what you look like.’”

In that spirit, she hasn’t ruled out other impressions. She has been thinking about the people who enable Trump—his supporters and cronies who have to twist themselves into rhetorical knots to defend his behavior. The parodic possibilities are tantalizing and endless, although if Cooper were ever to branch out she would limit herself to impersonating men, she tells me. “And I would definitely limit it to people who are very clearly up their own ass.”

At some point, Cooper intends to stop making these videos. While she is somehow immune, her husband has grown tired of Trump’s voice, reverberating around their apartment. Cooper now works out of a WeWork, to spare him. But also, she has other ambitions—ones that don’t include pretending to douse herself with toxic cleaning solutions to prove a point. She has wanted to adapt her books for television since she wrote them, and now she has a team to help her do that. She would also like to be compensated for her videos, but balks at the prospect of accepting financial support from individual people. (“I would however love it if Twitter, a giant billion-dollar corporation, paid me.”)

If Trump loses to former vice president Joe Biden, the election could be a natural end for her impersonations. “But even if he is reelected, which I don’t think he will be,” she hastens to add, “I will stop making these. The videos can’t go on forever.”

For now, her aim is to get people to care about politics and to wake them up to the stakes of this election. The fact that her success in the meantime has attracted some famous fans is a nice bonus. Or as she puts it, “I mean, there goes Jennifer Garner commenting on Instagram. Dan Rather is talking about me on Twitter. When Ben Stiller mentions me, I’m like, ‘Oh my God. Ben Stiller.’ It’s all incredible. I have a surreal moment like once an hour.”

Her fans keep her humble. “The first time I got recognized on the street, it was this 11-year-old girl,” she remembers. “She was like, ‘Are you Sarah Cooper?’ And I was like, ‘Oh! Yes! Are you on TikTok?’ And she was like, ‘No, I’m not on TikTok. My dad sends me your videos.’”

In the past month, Cooper has been making the rounds on cable TV. She debuted one of her newer clips on The Tonight Show. This week she hosted a livestream with Senator Kamala Harris. But she is still grappling with this pandemic just like the rest of us. It is an isolating time to become famous.

“How am I finding connection?” she wonders, when I ask. “I mean, I go on Twitter for better or worse. It’s this place where I just feel like people are talking about what’s happening right now. Even when there’s an earthquake, people just get on Twitter, like, ‘Hey, there’s an earthquake.’ You know what I mean?”

It makes Cooper feel a little less alone—the social media equivalent of exchanging a meaningful glance with someone at an awkward dinner. The kind of brow raise shared between women that communicates: “Yes, that happened.”

“Right now it feels like the world is falling apart,” she continues. “And we’re just like, ‘Let’s get on Twitter and be like, ‘Hey, hey, have you guys seen that the world’s falling apart?’ And someone else is there to be like, ‘Yep, I see it too.’”

Mattie Kahn is the culture director at Glamour.

Originally Appeared on Glamour