Pretending to be Trump: 'He had his hands around my neck so fast'

Emmy-nominated US actor John Di Domenico has been donning his Trump outfit since the 1980s and has appeared as him in Hollywood films Meet the Spartans and Disaster Movie, as well as late-night chat shows.

It was an “unbelievable ride” for Di Domenico when Trump first announced he would run for the presidency, with gigs booked around the world.

“I was in all the different states and meeting hundreds, sometimes thousands of people a day, and it was becoming very clear to me that he was going to win,” he told Sunday Morning.

“I remember communicating back to somebody at The New York Times, I said, ‘this guy's gonna win. You guys should know that what you have on the paper is off’. They said, ‘John, what you're saying is strictly anecdotal’, and I said, ‘I know data points, this guy is going to win’.”

But within about a month of Trump’s first administration, Di Domenico’s corporate Trump work faded away, he says, because it “did not really play well at that time” for HR departments of global companies to have a Trump impersonator at work.

“So, it was a weird kind of situation where he's in office, and now I'm getting less work. Then he was out of office, and the work came back online.”

Playing one of the most powerful figures in the world comes with its risks. Di Domenico has a security team around him when he’s suited up at outdoor events.

“We get into the elevator [at the Mandalay Bay Hotel Casino], and there's an older gentleman. I kind of profiled the guy immediately, ‘Oh, okay, this guy seems safe’.

“And man, the doors on the elevator closed and he had his hands around my neck so fast. It shocked me.

“The people who were with me, one of them was my producer, said, ‘it's not him. It's not him’, and the guy said, ‘I don't care. It's what he represents’.”

It quickly became clear to Di Domenico that, unlike any other character, he was essentially an avatar for Trump, “for love, and for hate”. Trump’s supporters whispered they would be voting for him – as in Trump – and people whom Di Domenico least expected to like him expressed support too, he says. So the “strongman” appeal was real, he says.

“One of the biggest things I learned playing Trump and so many corporate audiences, and meeting so many people from coast to coast and around the world, but specifically Americans, [was that] they all heard what they wanted to hear.

“I think he – Trump – is a master communicator in the sense he leaves things open and lets you interpret them. That is why this diverse group of people that I always thought would be against him were actually for him.”

As for what Trump thinks of him, Di Domenico recalls meeting Trump's former campaign manager and counsellor Kellyanne Conway on Fox & Friends, who said to him that Trump “loves you, he thinks you’re the nice Trump”.

“Over time, I've become more satirical and you have to – you have to keep moving forward.

“So I don't know how he feels about me now, or even if I'm on his radar, to be quite honest. But I have a decent following on TikTok. I've got like six million people, and I've got about 114,000 on YouTube.

“The funniest comment I get almost all the time is, ‘you're far too coherent’. I don't have the luxury of being totally incoherent. I have to tell a story in five, six minutes.”

Di Domenico is most requested as Trump but also portrays others such as Guy Fieri, Dr Phil McGraw, and the Mike Myers characters Austin Powers and Dr Evil. In fact, he was practising impersonations since the age of five, but he had to “reverse engineer” everything he learnt from speech therapy to do more impressions, he says.

“I always say Trump is the absolute perfect voice for someone like me who went through speech therapy because it's the over-enunciation, it's the drop-off when he's talking. All these things they taught me to do.”

Now, he also works to help others realise the potential of their own voice – “it is the number one thing you use every single day to communicate, to relate, to influence, to persuade”.

“You have this Ferrari in your throat and you are driving it like a Ford Fiesta.

“The voice that's going out to the world is not the same voice you're hearing in your head.

“It's the breath coming over those vocal folds and creating a unique sound that is your identity as much as your clothes that you're wearing. And it's your identity and your brand because how you look is the first impression, but how people remember you is your voice. And that's the lasting impression.”