Commentary: There’s an art to impersonating Trump. Just ask J-L Cauvin and Sarah Cooper

As caricature is to painting, impersonation is to acting. In a video titled “How to person woman man camera tv,” she focuses on Trump explaining how he had to make his way through this litany of words, an obstacle course requiring him to use all of his mental muscle to make the leap from “man” to “camera” before resting at the finish line of “TV.” Cooper, a Black woman, doesn’t do anything to resemble Trump physically. At the end, Trump crows that the test was a breeze, because he’s “cognitively there.” But as Cooper points to her temples while mouthing these words, her funny-scary simulacrum raises the same questions about the president’s mental fitness that were apparent in her hilarious and disturbing earlier video “How to medical,” in which Trump proposes ultraviolet light and disinfectant as possible treatments for COVID-19. Now she calls him her ‘head writer’ Sarah Cooper has become one of the social media sensations of the coronavirus era thanks to her lampooning of President Donald Trump. In the video “25 years of Mike Pence Coronavirus Briefings in a Minute!,” Cauvin gives voice to the smooth sycophant’s bamboozlement of the American public in praising Trump’s “bold leadership” in getting the coronavirus crisis under control in 15, 30, 45, 90, 250, 450 days to stop the spread that, in this telling, still appears to be raging 14 years later.