Bowen Yang wonders whether his Saturday Night Live cast mate James Austin Johnson should be concerned about backlash from Donald Trump ahead of his impersonations of the president on show’s upcoming 51st season.
“All it takes is for Trump to say one thing about him,” Yang said Monday on the newest episode of WTF With Marc Maron. “I got dinner with fantastic [SNL] writer Will Stephen, and we were talking about this, we were like ‘What’s the vibe gonna be going back?’” Yang recalled, in a media climate where Trump is calling for his television enemies to have their shows canceled. “And we were talking about James Austin Johnson. We were like, should he be worried at all?”
Yang added, “I don’t wanna engender any sort of fear on anyone’s behalf, but it’s just like… I just think I’m interested to see what the show will be like.”
Johnson, who’s been the show’s resident Trump impersonator since he was bumped up to featured player in 2021, has avoided being targeted directly by the president over the years despite being lauded for his portrayal.
In the finale to SNL’s Season 50 in May, Johnson played Trump defending himself for accepting a free $400 million plane from Qatar. The season set out to roast Trump with more fervor, leaning into Johnson’s impression by debuting a new fat suit and a bald cap for him to wear as Trump.
“Trump has morphed. James, who I think is brilliant, played Trump as the sort of diminished Trump. The guy at the back of the hardware store holding court, and that played because it felt relevant. But we are going to have to reinvent it again because, well, you saw the debate,” SNL boss Lorne Michaels described his thoughts on the tweaking of Johnson’s impression at the time.
On Monday, Yang and Maron discussed Trump’s absent reaction to Johnson’s portrayal, versus his meltdowns over Alec Baldwin’s impersonation of him on the show.
Trump “had an axe to grind with Alec Baldwin that preceded SNL… and I think now it seems like he’s not paying a lot of attention to SNL,” Maron said. Yang added that maybe it was because he “doesn’t feel like he needs to.”
Maron’s other theory for why Trump hasn’t come for Johnson or SNL so far is that “within an authoritarian system, at some point, even the ones that are more organized than his, they have to allow some” pushback on the public stage “to keep the left disillusioned.”
Maron pointed to Trump’s relatively soft reaction to South Park’s brutal roasting of his “teeny tiny” manhood, in comparison to his social media reactions calling for or celebrating the cancelation of shows hosted by critics like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, or Joy Behar on The View.
Yang said he’s grateful that SNL is “still on the air” in Trump’s America, particularly after “that Colbert s–t,” referring to The Late Show‘s cancelation which appeared to some to be a result of Paramount’s fealty to the president.
SNL “doesn’t have to change anything about itself” to adapt to the new media of the times, Yang also said, as he expressed his hope that Johnson gets to keep doing his Trump impersonation without retaliation.
Austin is “the most f—ing talented. He’s one of the best to ever do it, and he doesn’t get that credit enough. I think he should be able to spread his wings and do whatever he wants on that show,” Yang said.
SNL‘s next 51st season will premiere on October 4.
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