SNL’s James Austin Johnson Says He’s Reworking His Trump Impression for Darker Second Term

Saturday Night Live’s James Austin Johnson says his Donald Trump impression is evolving as the political climate surrounding the president in his second term becomes “super-dark.”

“The sands shift,” Johnson says in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “It used to not be as terrifying when he had moderate people around him who were trying to stop him. Now they’re all gone and his enemies are powerless and paralyzed to stop any of it, which all comes across as super-dark—how do you find what’s funny within that?”

Johnson says he approaches the role less as a static impersonation and more as an ongoing character study. “I’m just trying to find new things happening with his speech and his brain and definitely the darkness, which is not easy with a guy who’s been dominating every single day for almost 10 years,” he says.

Hints of that darker tone surfaced in the show’s recent “Snack Homies” sketch, where, in the middle of a free-association rant, Johnson’s Trump suddenly wondered aloud (as he has in real life) whether he’d get into heaven—a fleeting moment of vulnerability in an otherwise manic monologue. “Do I fit the criteria in terms of Christian and with regard to St. Peter and Pearly Gates?” he asks.

Johnson compares the process to finding layers within Shakespeare. “Hamlet is not saying, ‘I’m going to kill myself because I suck.’ He says he’s thinking about rivers and bones and ghosts, and amid all the soliloquies you pick up on an undercurrent of really complex moral struggle,” he says. “I don’t want to call what I’m doing Shakespeare. But I am trying to find the deeper forms of Trump, who is a rich text.”

Chances are Johnson’s Trump will be back on the scene this weekend as Saturday Night Live returns from a weeklong break with host Miles Teller and musical guest Brandi Carlile.

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