James Austin Johnson has appeared in a Coen brothers movie, been killed on Better Call Saul, and was once told by George Clooney that he looked just like Wes Anderson. But none of those brushes with fame, nor his regular appearances as a stand-up comedian and podcast host, did more to put Johnson on the map than Scooby-Doo and President Donald Trump.
“Scooby-Doo, they call him Scooby-Doo. They call the show Scooby-Doo. But Scooby doesn’t do anything. Scooby is not involved,” Johnson, as Trump, said in an August video that has amassed more than 1.7 million views on Twitter. “Half the time Scooby is not involved. He’s just a bystander. It’s one of the worst deals we’ve ever had.
“Scooby, frankly, gets much too much attention, money,” Johnson said later in the video. “We’re giving way too much attention to Mr. Scooby.” It’s uncanny, the way he replicates Trump’s tone and free-associative speaking style.
“I had a day job where I was folding clothes with other stand-up comedians and touring musicians, and we were all in this merch warehouse together. That’s really where I got a lot of my Trump takes from. It was like being around friends,” Johnson told Vanity Fair in a recent interview. “There’s a social aspect to it, that we’ll just be chitchatting about something, having a conversation at work. That’s where the Scooby-Doo one came from.
“That was just some lunch break horsing around,” Johnson added. “I literally ran out to get sandwiches in downtown L.A. and bring them back, and while I was walking back to my truck, I just started doing that video. And that’s probably the best one, circulation-wise.”
Johnson has been a stand-up comedian for years, having gotten his start as a teenager in clubs around Nashville, Tennessee. It was in similar Los Angeles venues where his pitch-perfect Trump impression began to take shape.
“When he first got elected and I was playing with the voice in 2016, 2017, it would show my sort of left-wing anger a lot. I would be like, ‘We’re going to kill everybody. We’re blowing up everybody’s houses I don’t like,’” Johnson recalled, seamlessly slipping in and out of his Trump voice. “I’d be more openly racist and homophobic as Trump.”
What Johnson noticed was that patrons didn’t respond to direct mimicry. “As it developed and got more sounding like him, the bar would go silent. Not necessarily laughing, which is very rare for that room. Either it’s talking and laughing, or it’s silent and laughing. But it’s never silent and silent,” he said. “I noticed that people were listening and not liking what they were hearing when I was repeating what Trump said or heightening it—making it more vicious to people, darker.”