The Trump Comedians Are Tired
· The Atlantic
In 2017, as Donald Trump was getting used to the White House furniture, Alec Baldwin was feeling exultant. His impersonation of the new president on Saturday Night Live had made him momentarily inescapable and given the comedy show its highest ratings in years. To capitalize on the momentum, Baldwin co-authored a book-length satirical memoir written from Trump’s perspective. Baldwin’s autobiography—which also came out that year and was excerpted as a cover story for Vanity Fair—noted that his take on the president “seemed to delight nearly everyone in the People’s Republic of Manhattan.” When he accepted an Emmy for his performance in the fall, he addressed Trump directly: “At long last, Mr. President, here is your Emmy.”
It was disorienting, then, to hear Baldwin declare, when I spoke with him earlier this summer, that this sort of comedy has become stale, boring, and useless. “None of it’s funny. I don’t find it funny anymore,” he told me. “There’s nothing left to say about Trump.”
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Clearly, something has changed—and not just for Baldwin, who effectively retired from the role back in 2020. The first Trump administration was a boon for comedians and for television. A cottage industry of new, politically inflected clip shows offered satirical commentary on the new president to a mostly liberal audience. Late-night comedy adopted Jon Stewart’s old playbook, trading quippy gags for more full-throated (and sometimes outright defiant) critiques of government. Ambiguity was out; everyone knew whose side these commentators were on, and other impersonators began vying for Baldwin’s crown. But the bubble collapsed right around the moment of Joe Biden’s ascension, and Trump’s return to power hasn’t inspired the same volume of riffs. Today, some of the comedians who rode the initial wave have come to feel a little like Baldwin does. They’re sick of the shtick—and they’re skeptical about the function of political comedy in a world that’s arguably beyond parody.
[Read: Why South Park did an about-face on mocking Trump]
Part of what once made Trump such a rich vein for comedic send-ups was that, at the start of his political career, he seemed straightforwardly ridiculous. Hadn’t this guy been shilling for Omaha Steaks with Gary Busey and Lil Jon? How would he spin the Oreo commercial he’d done with Peyton and Eli Manning, in which he’d challenged the brothers to a “lick race”? The jokes practically wrote themselves. Anthony Atamanuik, a Trump impersonator whose parody series, The President Show, ran for one season on Comedy Central in 2017, told me that at its best, the political comedy of that era also had a kind of diagnostic power: “I wanted my show to continue mostly because I saw each episode as an essay on an issue in American life, and the albatross I had was Trump.” His hope was that, for a liberal audience still reeling from the shock of his election, skewering the president could be a way to crystalize what had happened to the country.
That initial burst of left-leaning satire didn’t last. Studios gave the former Daily Show correspondents Michelle Wolf, Larry Wilmore, Hasan Minhaj, and Wyatt Cenac their own shows, only to cancel them before the end of the president’s first term. A 2020 New York Times Magazine story on this “boom and bust” suggested that some comedians—and some audiences—were tiring of the material even before it became clear that Trump would lose the election. Network late-night shows continued to treat the president as a punching bag, but the novelty had worn off.
Overexposure is one explanation for that decline. Another is that these liberal viewers started to expect something different from comedy as the reality of MAGA’s ascendance set in. More than over-the-top impersonators and Daily Show correspondents ridiculing the news, people seemed to be craving simple palliatives. By 2020, the most visible Trump satirist was the comedian Sarah Cooper, who filmed herself mouthing along to the president’s public statements while mimicking his facial expressions. Her work was almost post-comedic: Rather than writing her own material, she was giving people permission to laugh at the strangeness of his mannerisms. She eventually parlayed viral fame into a guest-hosting gig on Jimmy Kimmel Live and a Netflix special directed by Natasha Lyonne.
Trump’s return to office in 2025 could have been an opportunity for any of these comedians to stage comebacks, or for new shows to emerge. But although the president remains a target in liberal comedy circles, the market for this brand of humor has shrunk considerably. It remains most evident in today’s late-night lineup: The Daily Show, one of the progenitors of the form, remains on the air. (Its original host, Jon Stewart, returned in 2024.) Last Week Tonight With John Oliver—which once cautioned viewers against voting for Trump by reminding them of his family’s historical surname, Drumpf—is still going too, and in a recent episode covered Trump’s efforts to reshape the Department of Justice. Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers have consistently pursued Trump since his rise; even Jimmy Fallon, who was once reluctant to get political, will now occasionally take a shot.
Some new impersonators have risen to take Baldwin’s place: James Austin Johnson and Shane Gillis have both played the president with some success in recent years. But in this cohort, things aren’t quite the same as they were. Johnson’s impression hasn’t created the kind of splash that Baldwin’s once did; his version of Trump is reminiscent of the de rigueur presidential impressions of SNL seasons past. (That’s no judgment of comedic value—Johnson’s version is as accurate as it gets.) And last year, when CBS decided to end its long-running program The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, late-night TV lost one of its most prominent and consistent critics.
The administration’s attempts to chill dissenting speech elsewhere, although disturbing, don’t appear to have suppressed this sort of comedy’s prevalence in American culture. And in one case, such attempts had the opposite effect: In September, ABC suspended Kimmel’s show after Federal Communications Committee Chairman Brendan Carr demanded that it do so; a few days later, in response to a public outcry, the network reversed course. The fracas turned out to be good for ratings—Kimmel’s first show back was its most-watched in more than a decade.
[Read: Jimmy Kimmel ran right at his critics]
Still, the old guard doesn’t totally see the point. “All the majors that continue to just throttle him and carry on about him—move on to other people!” Baldwin told me. “It’s not gonna make any difference.” Atamanuik told me that by fixating on Trump, comedians risk missing the bigger issues, and that young people especially have “an anger at the entire system.” (The top-three late-night talk shows have been fighting for viewers in the coveted 18–49 age demographic for more than a decade.) “They know that Trump is just a product of something else,” he said. Meanwhile, Cooper said a few years ago that she has “no desire” to revisit her lip-syncs, and that “there’s nothing left to really do with it.”
Brent Terhune, another veteran of the short-form-video scene that flourished during the coronavirus pandemic, is less gloomy about the future of Trump-inflected comedy. This is partially because he’s not interested in taking on the president directly. Instead, he makes videos in the persona of a Trump fan. The character he’s played for nearly a decade, “Alpha Male,” is a sort of disgruntled MAGA vlogger—“a reaction and a reflection of people that are Trump die-hards,” Terhune told me. Part of what distinguishes the performance is that it’s at least somewhat empathetic; he said he’s always being told that Alpha Male reminds people of their brothers, dads, and uncles. His view is that because the Alpha Male character isn’t just about skewering Trump, it could potentially outlast his administration.
Terhune’s enthusiasm has certainly outlasted that of many of his peers, so maybe on-screen political comedy is just in need of new subjects. Although Atamanuik no longer consistently plays Trump, he has lately been impersonating Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—and Baldwin suggested that House Speaker Mike Johnson and former Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte could be deserving targets.
Or maybe you can make the same joke only so many times before you start wondering what it is you’re really doing. In 1962, when the impressionist Vaughn Meader released his landmark comedy album, The First Family, which poked fun at the Kennedys, the anthropologist Margaret Mead remarked that its very existence illuminated something about American society. “This making fun of people in authority is very healthy,” she told Life magazine. “It is the difference between democracy and tyranny.” The impressionists I spoke with might hesitate to agree with that assessment. But beyond the easy laugh of a presidential impersonation, humor can still be a potent force in defending a free society against tyranny—that is, if comedians are willing to keep finding new angles rather than repeat old gags.