When Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower golden escalator to announce he was running for president, it triggered boom times for John Di Domenico, a stage and TV performer who had already spent a decade perfecting the voice and mannerisms of the property mogul.
“My phone was ringing off the hook,” he said. “My Facebook was exploding. I said, ‘This will be great. Hopefully, he’ll make it through the summer.’”
As history records, he did make it through the summer of 2015, and the calls never stopped. More than five years later, Di Domenico is a regular on national TV and radio, with a lucrative sideline in corporate events, digital greetings, and personal appearances.
After his most successful year ever, like other Trump impersonators, he is planning for life after the White House. And just as administration staff prepare to hand off to a new team arriving, so the army of Trump impersonators, which has joked, satirized, and selfied its way through his presidency must give way to a new wave of facsimile Joe Bidens.
Di Domenico has more to lose than most. He has built a replica of the White House briefing room at his Las Vegas home and has five $4,000 bouffant wigs to choose from.
But he says Trump, as a figure with a life and a following beyond politics, is not going anywhere.
“I don’t think there’ll be any drop-off for me. You have 74 million people who absolutely adore this guy, so there’ll be a lot of work on the pro-Trump side,” he told the Washington Examiner from his home studio.
“He is going to keep popping up because he will not let himself be irrelevant.”
On a recent Thursday, Di Domenico awoke at 3:15 a.m. to take part in The Howard Sterns Show’s season finale. At 8:00 a.m., he recorded a video for a corporate client before spending most of the day hosting a virtual tech meeting (as himself) before recording eight messages for Cameo, an online service that delivers greetings from celebrities, at $225 a pop.
That high price tag marks Di Domenico out as an elite Trump, befitting a performer whose first client was the Trump Organization itself. It cast the actor, writer, and comedian in the role of Trump for an Apprentice-themed game at its Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City in 2004.
“The only direction I got was, ‘Be meaner, be meaner,’ which I thought was hilarious,” he said.
He credits a childhood speech impediment and years of speech therapy with helping him master the different elements of vocal control that turned him into a mimic, able to transform himself into Dr. Phil or Mike Myers at will.
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It made him an established figure in 2015 and his Trump a staple of commercials and TV shows, ahead of an influx of new impersonators. They will struggle more to adapt, he said.
“People who are not writers, comedians, or actors go out and buy a $20 wig and MAGA hat are out there selling their wares,” he said.
“I don’t know if these guys have the skill set to do it beyond posing for a photo.”
Performers like Reggie Brown know what comes next. He still makes money out of performing as Barack Obama, but it is not like the years when he was a regular on Bill Maher’s TV show and performed in 23 countries. Although Trump’s first year in office turned out to be Brown’s busiest, 2019 was the slowest.
The new world of digital greetings messages keeps him in business, he added, but he also spends time now developing an online anti-racism campaign and designing a top-secret, high-performance range of athletic apparel.
He said he had passed on survival tips to friends in the close-knit world of presidential impersonators.
“Of course, I would love for it to go on. And I think it will for my lifetime. The older I get, the more naturally I age into the character,” he said.
“He is such a historical figure, it will keep playing for a while, but there’s no time like when your character is in office, for you to make as much as you can, be smart with your money, and enjoy the hell out of it.”
The danger, he added, is that scandal knocks your president out of favor. Just ask the Clinton guys, he said.
But for Di Domenico, the future looks bright. And he still expects to be able to use his briefing room for skits.
“In his mind, Trump’s never leaving the White House. I had a whole thing in my act about Trump being president for life … he’s going to change the Constitution,” he said, his voice morphing into the idiosyncratic rhythms of the president.
“He’ll probably have a replica of the James Brady Briefing Room put into Mar-a-Lago.”
