John Di Domenico looks nothing like Donald Trump: he’s 17 years younger, several inches shorter and a natural brunet, though lately he keeps his head shaved to make putting on the coppery wig easier, and his eyebrows bleached to match. Becoming Trump requires a full hour of hair and makeup. He tapes three large photographs of the president, one in profile and two straight-on, to any mirror he’s using, and then uses Ben Nye CoCo Tan foundation to turn his skin the requisite shade of atomic tangerine, dabs on wrinkles, lengthens his nose, and so on. Trump has “quite a big head,” but there’s not much anyone can do about that.
Even with the elaborate costume, Di Domenico’s physical resemblance to the president requires a little imagination – but of the many people who “do” Trump, his take is the most uncanny. It’s the voice. He recreates the uncommon way that Trump, to use Di Domenico’s phrase, “speaks from his teeth”; the wild fluctuations of nasality; the inconsistent New York accent; the sibilant “S”s and exaggerated vowels. He has also mastered the neck jerk, the squint, the off-tilt swagger. When Conan O’Brien and Chelsea Handler needed a Trump for their late-night talk shows, they called Di Domenico, and he has also become a regular on Fox News’s morning talk show.
Di Domenico enjoys the appearances on Fox and ABC, the cameos on Glenn Beck’s radio show, the invitations to do adverts and spoof films, but he makes his living at corporate events, trade shows and private parties. He’s the guy executives hire to keep middle management amused at national sales meetings, or to provide a little excitement at the launch party of a flu-reduction medicine. He’s the booth decoration that gets passersby interested in your carpet company. He is the entertainment. He can do Guy Fieri and Jay Leno and Austin Powers and Dr Evil, but for the last decade his trademark impression has been Trump. At the peak of the 2016 campaign, that one impression earned him as much as $40,000 a month.
Whenever Di Domenico appears in public in costume, people turn and gawk. They pull out their phones to take video, or they laugh spontaneously. “Oh my god,” they say. Or, breathlessly, “Donald!”
One afternoon in March, exiting a New York hotel, the sight of Di Domenico-as-Trump sent the front desk manager into a fit of giggles that verged on a panic attack. “Oh my god,” the guy kept saying, trying to catch his breath. “No way.” Faux Trump squinted, aimed a presidential finger in the man’s direction, and agreed to a selfie.
In the photograph, Di Domenico has his chest and gut thrown out, as if he’s leading from the widest point of his red sateen tie. The wig crests low over his brow. He’s flashing a presidential thumbs-up with one hand, his head is cocked to one side so his eyes squint unevenly, and his mouth has that protruded, half-open look of an aggravated orangutan. It’s all correct.
Di Domenico handed the man his business card, with details of how to find him on social media. “Tag me,” he said, “You’re terrific.” And left.
Two college-aged guys hanging around stared after him, vaguely stricken. “It’s really good,” said one. His friend nodded and looked around the lobby, presumably for Secret Service agents, or a hidden camera crew. “What the fuck is going on?”
As a professional impersonator, Di Domenico makes his living in an America where, as the historian Daniel J Boorstin wrote in 1962, “fantasy is more real than reality”. We have become, he wrote, the “first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that [we] can live in them”. By the time Trump started to appear on the front pages of New York City tabloids in the late 1980s, politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce had been “transformed into congenial adjuncts of showbusiness,” as the cultural theorist Neil Postman famously wrote in 1984. Under this new dispensation, celebrities emerged as the unpredictable “real-life” stars of a never-ending show unfolding in real time. Thirty years later, Americans remain so compelled by the power of celebrity to make life feel entertaining and meaningful that we are thrilled by the mere facsimile of a famous person, so long as he conveys a hint of the same magic.
When Trump declared his candidacy, he turned himself into the most visible celebrity in the world, and Di Domenico’s career exploded. By Di Domenico’s estimation, peak demand for Trump impressions came during the election cycle, when Trump’s political aspirations could still be seen as a joke that hadn’t yet arrived at the punchline. Di Domenico worked every day for more than a year. He was soon joined by a cadre of other Donalds: the comedian Anthony Atamanuik, whose work Di Domenico admires (“Trump is all id. Anthony’s Trump is the id on steroids,”); the prolific impressionist Frank Caliendo; Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon; and, of course, Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live. Di Domenico, though, has been doing this for 13 years – longer than any other major Trump impersonator – which not only lends him a bit of godfatherly cred, but also gives his impression singular nuance.
The relationship between the impersonator and the impersonated is a bizarre form of intimacy. Apart from its lopsidedness, the connection is almost spousal, marked by the closeness that comes from living with someone day after day for years and years, memorising their gestures, assimilating their speech patterns. There’s admiration and irritation, conjecture about the other’s intentions and inner life, struggles to keep a separate identity, and the sense of ownership that comes from believing you know a person better than anyone else. It’s a parasitic homage.
Di Domenico keeps inside him, nested like matryoshka dolls, all the many selves Trump has fashioned in the last 30 years: Trump the businessman on CNN silkily telling Larry King in 1989 that his breath stinks; Trump the reality television star firing Cyndi Lauper on The Celebrity Apprentice in 2010; Trump the candidate declaring that he could stand on 5th Avenue in New York and shoot someone without losing a vote. Di Domenico talks about Trump with the same casual authority he displays when talking about himself. “He’s gained a lot of weight lately,” he’ll remark offhandedly. Or, “Nah, he doesn’t have OCD. Or he has selective OCD.” Frequently, Trump’s cadence will sneak its way into Di Domenico’s speech: a nasal vowel, a “tremendous”.
Every morning, Di Domenico reads the news, scanning for any stories or new behaviours he needs to incorporate. He can list and demonstrate Trump’s most common gestures, most of which only appeared when he entered political life. There’s “the T-Rex”, when he plasters his forearms to his sides and waves his stiff hands back and forth, as if conducting a tiny, mad choir. There’s “the OK” – slightly effete, open-handed, with the thumb and forefinger pinched together and the wrist cocked and loose. And “the Hi”, where Di Domenico reaches out his right arm and tilts the hand up in greeting. Then there’s “the Heil Hitler” – here he straightens his wrist – “though he’s stopped doing that. I think someone told him to stop doing that”.
Trump’s mannerisms have changed over time more dramatically than any other character Di Domenico has attempted. “It’s a much bigger repertoire now than it used to be,” he says. Trump used to speak softly; his expressions were typically phlegmatic, and his gestures were minimal. “For the most part he was in controlled situations – a hotel opening, or a show where he was the boss.” People were deferential and obsequious. No one was openly mocking him to his face, or accusing him of lying about his wealth and success.
Once the Republican primary debates began, Trump’s expressions changed. He debuted “the get-outta-here hand wave, the sceptical squint – any way he could discredit, dissociate, discount somebody”, Di Domenico told me. He demonstrated in quick succession the elastic facial exercises indicating exaggerated disgust: eye rolls, shrugs, clicking the tongue off the top of the mouth as if to get rid of a bad taste. These theatrical gestures subtly kept Trump in control of the exchange – when it was Jeb Bush’s time to speak during the debates, the cameras were still on Trump.
When people meet Di Domenico in his Trump costume, it’s not always clear that they know the difference between reality and fiction, or that they care. In the months leading up to the election, at corporate events all over the country, men in business casual would lean in and whisper in his ear, “I think you’re great. My wife hates you but I think you’re great. I haven’t told her I’m voting for you.” Women would squeeze close to him and murmur, “Will you grab my pussy?”
Di Domenico knows things about the American electorate that pollsters and pundits cannot. During the campaign, people’s responses to his impression resembled the pure wonderment of children seeing Santa Claus at the mall: they knew it wasn’t the real one, but still they felt moved to confess their hopes and griefs as if it were. He had expected this in “red” states such as Texas and Arkansas, but was startled to encounter the same in San Francisco and Chicago. People he expected to loathe Trump quietly adored him. At a meeting of people working in healthcare in New York City, he polled the crowd to see who was voting to “make America great again”, and the whole room cheered. (“After this year, I will never be surprised by anything. About anybody,” he told me.) He grew used to men in HILLARY FOR JAIL T-shirts asking him while posing for selfies, “Are you gonna lock that cunt up?”
Such questions require delicate answers from Di Domenico, who usually resorts to saying essentially nothing – in a perfectly Trumpian way. “I’m gonna do what I can, I’m gonna do what I can,” he says in the familiar babbling rhythm. Or, “She deserves it, don’t you think she deserves it?” He never echoes their language. It would be consummately not his manner, which is mild and aims to please – and he usually has a contract that forbids obscenities. “They can say whatever they want to me, but I won’t …” he trailed off. He told me about one woman who grabbed his balls, though he wasn’t sure whether this was retribution for Trump’s pussy-grabbing or another sexual advance. “I let people choke me,” he said calmly. “Whatever you wanna do. If it’s funny, you’re not going to hurt me.”
On election night, Di Domenico worked a party with 800 guests. He walked the grounds of a mansion filled with people wearing Crooked Hillary hats, Make America Great Again ice sculptures, Build a Wall T-shirts. “I was just blown away,” he said. Later, just as he was about to post a selfie from the party, he noticed a sign behind him in the photograph that made him stop: “Trump for President: Make America White Again.”
When the results came in, he wasn’t surprised.
Di Domenico was raised in an outer suburb of Philadelphia named Ambler, a town whose biggest claim to fame at the time was that it housed the largest asbestos factory in America. He grew up playing “on the Moon”, which is what kids called the 25-acre lot of asbestos waste in town, and studying two types of people: actors and businessmen. “Coming from where I come from – my dad was a steel worker with a ninth-grade education – I always just wanted to get the fuck out of Ambler and have money! Have a life!” he told me. “Not have to worry about ‘I can buy this shirt or I can eat’.”
Power and money, and the people who had both, seemed perpetually elsewhere. As a young man, he felt wistful for the era of Carnegies and Rockefellers, when businessmen were public figures and statesmen, or the era of old Hollywood and its glamour. The first album he bought was by the comedian David Frye, who did impressions of influential men of the mid-century, most famously Richard Nixon. Di Domenico also had a severe speech impediment as a kid, one that vanished for the first time when he mimicked Frye doing Nixon. He started experimenting with other voices, and found that whenever he spoke as other people, he spoke cleanly. He decided to be an actor.
Di Domenico went to Philadelphia to study drama around the same time that Donald Trump started appearing in those New York tabloids with nameless models and showing up in New York Times headlines about his work to refurbish the derelict Wollman Rink in Central Park. (The Wollman Rink deal, at the time, was perceived to be an act of great personal generosity, and the triumph of the private sector over ineffectual government oversight.) Trump was no Carnegie, but he was a new kind of celebrity businessman: he had the success, the glitz and the cosmopolitanism that Di Domenico wanted for his own life. Trump’s business was construction, which was reminiscent of working-class Ambler, but he was building towers of glass in Manhattan. Especially after the Wollman Rink deal, he presented himself as a genius at turning trash into gold. Trump understood, as the cultural critic Neal Gabler would later write, “that in an entertainment-driven society, celebrity was among the most effective tools of salesmanship, and that consequently a businessman’s job was not only the management of assets, but the management of image”.
Di Domenico was, if not envious, then watchful. He subscribed to Success magazine. His first wife gave him Trump’s ghostwritten memoir The Art of the Deal for Christmas in 1987, the year it came out, inscribed with a note: “I don’t like this guy, I don’t like what he stands for, but I thought you might want this book. Merry Christmas.” There’s a story Di Domenico still tells from The Art of the Deal in which Trump, deep in a failing construction deal, holds a meeting with a potential investor in a room overlooking the project’s building site. Work had stopped because there was no more money, but Trump hired extra construction workers to drive the trucks around in order to give the illusion of progress. Di Domenico told me that story recently, at a coffee shop in Manhattan, freshly changed out of his costume and bald once more. He grinned and shook his head. “At first glance, I think you can admire him. And I think that’s something he really wants, is to be admired,” he said. “Once you go below the surface of him, it’s not things that are admirable.”
But what makes a Trump impersonation so fascinating is that Trump’s surface, carefully crafted, is all we have of the man. A superficial rendition of his gestures is as faithful a portrayal as any. Conversely, the challenge of playing Trump is that Trump has always been impersonating Trump. As Gabler observed in Life: The Movie, a history of the rise of entertainment culture in America, Trump’s ostentatious displays of wealth – his gold-plated apartment, his casinos, his yacht – “were all what Trump once called ‘props for the show’, which he admitted was ‘Trump’, and which he crowed had enjoyed ‘sold-out performances everywhere’, meaning, presumably, the media.”
The one fixed quality of Trump, Di Domenico believes, is his ability to manipulate the media. This relentless performance, this commitment to conjuring the image of success and power, confident in the knowledge that reality will follow the image – this is the “DNA”, as Di Domenico calls it, of the character.
Di Domenico originally dreamed of a traditional acting career, but he couldn’t quite get his break in film or theatre, and he worried about money. In 1997, the year Trump published The Art of the Comeback, about his recovery from bankruptcy, divorce and $3.4bn of debt, Di Domenico discovered that there was a good living to be made dressing up as Dr Phil or Ozzy Osbourne or Sean Connery and working corporate gigs. If he hesitated before quitting the off-Off-Broadway circuit, it wasn’t for long – he was married; they had a house to pay for. Now, when he chooses what roles he’ll play, he first considers the possible dividends: “How much can I sell this character for in a corporate environment, and how much do I want to invest?”
The presidential impression has had an uneasy role in American public life. No one even attempted it until 1928, when the famous comedian Will Rogers did a few lines as Calvin Coolidge at the end of a radio performance. Half the audience thought Coolidge had somehow materialised in the studio, and the other half, who caught the joke, found it shocking and disrespectful. Rogers immediately issued a public apology. Ten years later, Rogers tried again with Franklin D Roosevelt, who was so tickled by the impression that he encouraged it, inviting Rogers to appear alongside him and laughing uproariously at the sound of his own voice spoken back to him. The historian Peter Robinson suggests that Rogers and Roosevelt formed an alliance between humour and politics “as a way of nourishing democracy at a moment when worldwide cataclysms and the mounting complexity of modern life threatened to smother it”.
A century later, we still have the worldwide cataclysm and the mounting complexity, but we’ve passed through whatever veil was separating the spheres of celebrity and politics. The presidency itself has long had a theatrical element, but by the 1970s the New York Times journalist Russell Baker was arguing that the job of the president and the first family was to “provide a manageably small cast for a national sitcom, or soap opera, or docudrama, making it easy for media people to persuade themselves they are covering the news while mostly just entertaining us”. Reagan once told a journalist that he couldn’t imagine how anyone did the job without being a trained actor.
We no longer need impersonators to turn the president into good television. Presidents deliver comedy routines at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner (or they used to, before Trump decided to snub it) and make guest appearances on Saturday Night Live. Barack Obama “slow-jammed the news” on The Tonight Show, allowed Stephen Colbert to submit him to a mock job interview, and appeared on Zach Galifianakis’s internet comedy show to promote the new government healthcare plan. These days, presidential impersonators are a special class of critics – or, as Di Domenico pointed out to me, court jesters.
If you study successful presidential impressions, three broad categories emerge. The first aims to gently bring “the leader of the free world” back down to human size. This is Steve Bridges doing George W Bush at the White House correspondent’s dinner in 2006, desperately trying and failing to pronounce “nuclear proliferation”, or Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford affably falling over furniture. Second, there is the impression that’s sharper and more political – a lament, a critique – as when David Frye’s paranoid, aggressive Nixon growled: “I love America, and you always hurt the one you really love.” More rarely, you’ll see presidential impressions that enact a kind of wish fulfilment. The most popular one of Obama was done by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, with Peele as Obama and Key as Obama’s “anger translator”, who exploded with all the righteous anti-Republican rage Democrats often speculated must seethe below Obama’s diplomatic public persona.
Di Domenico’s take on Trump follows the first model: gentle mockery with an occasional edge. His goal is to avoid both reverence and outright disrespect. Insisting during the act that his hands are actually huge? Fine. Jokes about Trump committing sexual assault? Not fine. This allows him to do the same material with Glenn Beck, Fox News, Conan O’Brien and Chelsea Handler, and leave everybody smiling. “If you know my politics, I’ve failed,” he likes to say. He feels no need for an overly negative portrayal of Trump because, in his opinion, Trump is doing that himself. “It’s too easy. It’s much harder to write comedy and keep it inclusive. If I can write for right-leaning people and left-leaning people, then I’m doing my job. Like an old-school entertainer.”
The decision is partly philosophical, partly practical. Other impressions, like Anthony Atamanuik’s aggro Id Trump, are deliciously satisfying in short bursts, but Di Domenico’s impression has to entertain (and not grate) sometimes for hours at a time. “That’s why it comes back to the middle road. The Buddhist Trump,” he joked. “The Zen Trump.”
This spring, Di Domenico travelled to New York, as he often does for work, to MC the 50th birthday party of an Orthodox Jewish hedge fund manager. The hedge fund manager’s wife had flown Di Domenico out from his home in Las Vegas, put him up in a hotel, and paid a generous fee (“I can’t remember exactly, but a minimum of $5,000”) for a 20-minute set, general introductions, and some glad-handing among the dinner tables.
He spent the day of the party in a gloomy hotel room scattered with granola bars, coffee cups and empty bottles of Diet Snapple. Di Domenico writes all his own material, and his performance has to evolve daily to keep up with Trump’s volatility and to meet the demands of the client. For this evening, he was going to have to write a bit about a piece of legislation called the Taylor Force Act, which would deny US federal funds to the Palestinian Authority, which “from my perspective is a total boner-killer”. He thought about it for a while, and then decided to just bring up the legislation without making it funny, and then slide sideways into a joke by making fun of a co-signer, the moderate Republican senator Lindsey Graham (“Lindsey: what is that, a girl’s name?”). He speculated that Trump would probably make this dig himself. He then spent some time figuring out how to poke fun at the birthday boy’s enthusiasm for sport. “Which word sounds funnier: slalom or dressage?”
After putting the finishing touches to the night’s routine and phoning in a quick voiceover, he began his hour-long hair-and-makeup process, which he sometimes has to undertake three or four times a day. To pass the time, he turned on one of the Trump YouTube compilations he mimics to warm up. While the screen played a Game of Thrones parody that spliced Trump’s head and voice into various scenes, in the mirror, Di Domenico’s face, now half his and half not, spoke along with the dubs taken from one of Trump’s rallies: “We Can’t! Be! The stupid country! Any more.” He looked at me in the mirror, and smirked.
The party occupied the thickly carpeted second-floor banquet room of what a waiter described to me as a “kosher Persian grill slash sushi restaurant” in midtown Manhattan. A hundred people sat in rented chairs eating platters of rice and kebabs, dressed in suits and yarmulkes, wigs and colourful dresses with high necklines. There were pink tea roses and blue mood lighting, and at the front of the room was a teetering screen with a picture of the honoree at age 12 superimposed with the words “HAPPY BIRHDAY” [sic]. Spirits were high: the children had been allowed as many Shirley Temples as they could manage, and Di Domenico made his way around the dining room, comparing hand sizes with the men and telling all the pretty women that he was going to make them “the fourth first lady … the fourth lady!”
Di Domenico’s Trump is genuinely softer than the president himself – his language is less brutal and his manner more genial. Fielding a question about how you show a woman you love her, he’ll suggest putting a hand on the woman’s shoulder, or eating a Tic Tac to freshen your breath. A fan handed him a phone and asked him to say hello to a co-worker who was, the man said, Lebanese. “I love that you’re Lebanese,” Di Domenico crooned into the phone. “I love Lebanese people and I’ve known them all my life. They’re great. And say hello to your girlfriend for me.”
The more I listened to Di Domenico-as-Trump, the more likely I was to laugh than to wince – a defanging effect that was unsettling. Laughing at the president’s expense also felt a lot like laughing with relief at the opportunity to not take him seriously – to find him, if only for a moment, funny rather than frightening. I asked Di Domenico if he ever worried about the ethical implications of this work – whether he might be seen as normalising Trump’s behaviour. He answered immediately: No. “I’m not going change anyone’s mind in a 10-second interaction.”
Later in the evening, as waiters cleared dirty plates, Di Domenico delivered the birthday speech, hitting the normal talking points (“Horrible people, the press, horrible”) and crowing that he was confident of re-election in 2020. The crowd cheered; the two bartenders in the corner booed quietly.
Part of Di Domenico’s talent is mimicking the circuitous way Trump speaks: he’ll begin a story (“I was visiting a coal mine in Tennessee … ”), and then digress once (“fantastic people, coal people”); go back to the beginning after a while (“Anyway, I was in Tennessee … ”); digress again (“No one loves the South more than me, by the way … ”); start over (“So, in Tennessee … ”) and so on. His strategy is to create this effect without digressing nearly as far or frequently as Trump himself – truly accurate mimicry would require a scale of incoherence that would lose the audience.
Di Domenico was well received, but the gig still didn’t feel great. A few of his jokes had fallen flat, and he was grouchy about the conditions: no podium (which helps him appear presidential) and no backstage, nowhere for him to fall out of character and rest. He had to smile through two hours and 45 minutes of speeches. By 11 o’clock, he was famished and tired, irritated that he hadn’t negotiated to leave immediately after his 20-minute set. Eventually, some time between the second and third rabbi, a member of the staff brought out a plate of leftover rice and meat and set it on a banquet table in the far back corner that some exhausted partygoers had abandoned. Still dressed as Trump, Di Domenico sank into the chair and began eating. He suddenly looked like no more than a tired performer, a man in a ridiculous costume. His wig drooped. But when it came time to cut the cake, he popped back up, jolly and irascible, Trump once more, and bounded to the front of the room to lead a round of Happy Birthday.
The next morning, Di Domenico would be up early to do a photoshoot with “one of my Melanias”, and then run to a meeting with an agent who might help him better capitalise on the wave of Trump attention. Then, he’d rush into costume and take a car to the Fox News studios in the evening to shoot two segments with their late-night talk show RedEye (which has since been cancelled), sleep for a few hours, and then get up at 4.30am to get into costume one more time for a segment with Fox & Friends and a quick Facebook Live Q&A at Huffington Post.
This is the pace Di Domenico has been working at since Trump got the nomination. Despite his success, he retains the anxiety of the performer who isn’t sure when the laughter will die or the calls will stop coming. In the time I spent with him, he was constantly on the phone or writing an email – angling for a new appearance, negotiating a new contract, pushing and pushing to establish himself as “The #1 Trump Impersonator” and to turn that distinction into bigger, better gigs. “I love what I do and I feel like this is my last shot,” he told me. “That’s why I want to leverage this right now and ride the Trump train as long as I can.”
Playing “Trump” has not been as rewarding for John Di Domenico as it has for Donald Trump, but it has given him a sliver of the recognition he always wanted as an actor. Di Domenico is in movies and on television all the time now – as Trump, but still. In May, he even received an Emmy nomination for acting in a commercial. He’s finally the real deal. Or, sort of real.
When the cab driver taking Di Domenico to the birthday party in Manhattan asked him if he’d met Alec Baldwin, Di Domenico, who was in full costume, replied as Trump rather than himself: “He’s terrible, terrible. He’s very mean to me. Very mean. I’m so nice to him! I’ve given him many compliments. His career was in the toilet until he started doing me.” But when the cabbie asked if he’d ever been on Saturday Night Live, he broke character and replied as himself. The switch was immediate, and Di Domenico’s voice, lighter and less nasal, sounded full of good humour and earnest longing. “Oh, I wish. I wish. We were very close there for a minute.”
While in character, Di Domenico is never asked if he has ever met the man he’s portraying; the very question would break the mood. But they have met, only once – while Di Domenico, suitably enough, was pretending to be someone else.
Trump’s birthday parties, particularly the ones held at his casinos in Atlantic City – say, Trump’s Castle or the Taj Mahal – are aggressively themed and involve elaborate entertainment, with cameos from the ultra-famous. The Beach Boys played his 50th birthday. At his 60th, guests were showered with $200,000 in cash and prizes for a “James Bond heist” theme, during which Bond girl lookalikes danced among the tables and then swooned at The Donald’s feet after he, dressed as 007, arrived just in time to save the day and give away a new BMW Z4.
At Trump’s 55th, Di Domenico was hired to impersonate Austin Powers – to pop out of the cake in the style of a 1950s stag party girl, and then banter with Trump before declaring an end to the multi-million dollar pageant with a hearty “Yeah, baby.” He burst out of the fake cake in a spray of cardboard icing (“Bet you weren’t expecting me, baby!”) and, flanked by a few dozen chorus girls, joined Trump on stage for a kick line and some light repartee. The two men stood together facing the cheering crowd: a man impersonating himself standing beside his future impersonator, in a casino masquerading as a castle.
This hall of mirrors is where Trump thrives. He may understand, better than anyone else, why an impersonator can acquire the power of the person he’s impersonating: if you have the aura of fame, it doesn’t matter any more if you’re “real”. Even his early publicity stunts were designed to convince the world he was a statesman. In 1988, when Mikhail Gorbachev visited the US on a trip to improve Soviet-American relations, Trump offered him an invite to Trump Tower, where he could “act as a representative of the American people”. When Gorbachev accepted this preposterous invitation, Trump was triumphant – only for the Soviet leader’s staff to cancel days later.
Hearing of Trump’s disappointment, a reporter for New York’s Channel 5 called up a Gorbachev lookalike named Ronald Knapp, hired a black stretch limousine and four Russian models, and headed to Fifth Avenue. Upon arrival, a crowd quickly gathered around the faux-Gorbachev, who was greeting onlookers outside Trump Tower. Trump, thinking that Gorbachev had changed his plans, ran down from his office to the street with his bodyguards to meet the statesman. He elbowed his way through the crowd and arrived flushed and beaming.
Later, Trump claimed that he was never fooled. But there is news footage from the afternoon, and on it you can see a young Trump’s eagerness as he moves through the crowd with an embarrassed, pleased smile on his face. “It is a great honour,” he says to the man pretending to be Gorbachev, and proudly shakes his hand. Gordon Elliott, the reporter who staged the whole thing, said later that Trump was starstruck. As he told the New York Times, “There was absolutely no question that he bought it.”
Main photograph by stephenedgar.ca