James Austin Johnson Took His Trump to SNL UK, Which Had Nobody to Play Him

On Saturday, Saturday Night Live UK opened its James Norton episode with Prime Minister Andy Burnham meeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Downing Street, a riff on the pair's real meeting earlier in the week. George Fouracres played Burnham and Freddie Meredith played Zelenskyy, and things were going about as well as diplomacy ever goes until Burnham promised to raise Ukraine's worries with the American president. Saying the name was enough. Out walked James Austin Johnson, the American show's Trump since 2021, in what LateNighter called the franchise's first crossover between current U.S. and U.K. cast members.

Johnson's Trump explained he'd picked up the trick of appearing when summoned from Beetlejuice, which may be the most accurate thing anyone has said about the man in a decade. Then he proposed a job swap: he'd take Britain, Burnham could have America, and he warned the Prime Minister that the place was a mess and he'd hate it. He riffed on small boats, Manchester City and Percy Pigs, the gummy sweets, and was visibly delighted to learn you can swear on British television, the way a child is delighted to learn Grandma keeps the cookies on the low shelf.

The line that will travel came at the end. Johnson's Trump complained that the entire SNL UK cast didn't have one guy who could play him, and declared British comedy to be in a bad situation. That joke works because it's true. Britain has spent ten years mocking the American president in newspapers, on panel shows and in every pub with a television, and when the moment came to actually do the voice, they had to send for one, like a family that's argued about a piano for years and finally has to hire a man to move it.

I can't give you a view count for the clip yet, so the verdict rests on what aired and how it was reported, and I'll leave out the rest of the episode, which I couldn't verify beyond the cold open. On that alone, it worked. Johnson's Trump has always been less an impression than a weather report on the inside of the man's head, and it turns out the forecast is the same over London: rambling, with a chance of Manchester City.

There's something fitting about the whole arrangement. America used to export blue jeans and rock and roll. Now it exports a man doing an impression of a man, so a foreign country can laugh at a leader it didn't vote for and can't get away from either. Cynthia Erivo hosts SNL UK next week, presumably without him, which is more than most of Europe has managed.

Every country gets the comedians it deserves, and what it can't grow at home, it imports, same as bananas and bad news.