Anthony Atamanuik - American Tantrum: The Donald J. Trump Presidential Archives

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AMERICAN TANTRUM . Copyright 2018 by OneThirtySevenLTD. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Interior photographs by Deborah Feingold

Map illustration by Dyna Moe

Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

Cover photographs Deborah Feingold

Digital Edition OCTOBER 2018 ISBN: 9780-06-285194-9

Version 10102018

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-285188-8

To my mom, my stepfather, my dad, and my intelligent,

beautiful, and patient wife, Flossie

I alone can fix it.

D ONALD J. T RUMP

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

P LATO

The Tang-hued tweet storm that is Donald J. Trump is a fateful challenge to democracy, science, the rule of law and the rational mind. In the struggle to maintain our sanityand form of governmentwe need insight into (and comic distance from) our 45th and most infantile, vindictive, insecure, racist, ignorant and hallucinogenic president. Thankfully, for our nation and the world, we have a brilliant improv comic, impressionist, sketch artist, Comedy Central star, and now author to help us understand, survive, and laugh our way through Trumps epic American Tantrum. His name is Anthony Atamanuik and IMHO he is a genius.

Trump is a special test for comedians, including Anthony. Our president is so over the top that no one elses shtick can match him. He is a mess of contradiction: oafish and yet ominous; openly full of it, yet out to destroy anyone not beholden to him; pathetic, almost pitiable, in proclaiming his insecurities, but furious at those who validate his self-loathing. He is more than vaguely amusing at times, but very rarely in the way he intends. He provokes nervous laughter, ominous laughter. He is the post-postWorld War Twoera strongman that only America could produce: a pratfall-prone, cartoonish salesman who harbors a goalsweeping, untrammeled powerthat isnt funny.

So we need to laugh, warily. But how? Well, you can play Trump as a cardboard figure with news-of-the-week jokes generated by committee and acted with a few obvious physical gestures. A certain prominent actor does just that, but it is neither very funny nor all that thought-provoking. No, the only way to play Trump is from the inside out; to bravely spelunk into the life and mind of the most powerful infantile narcissist on earth. You have to inhabit him, channel his weaknesses, his desperate desire to be admired, think and react as he does, then take it further over the top than even he would. Thats precisely what Atamanuik does so amazingly and amusingly on Comedy Centrals The President Show, and now in this book, American Tantrum, a made-up series of real life interviews with and transcripts of The Donald. It could only have been written by someone able to see the world as he sees it and return alive to reveal the dark humor in it.

How does Anthony make what is widely regarded as by far the best Donald Trump? One key is improv. He isnt an impersonator, or impressionist. He is an inhabitorsomeone who climbs inside a character. That knack, in turn, stems from decades of experience in sketch and improv. Born in Boston to a singer-actor mother and a rock drummer father, Anthony took his childhood living room lounge act to his Cambridge, Massachusetts, prep school. In fifth grade, he told his teacher that he was going to do a skit about the headmaster. The teacher objected. Anthony vowed to do a different skit. Of course, when he got onstage he did the first one. It killed. (He also moved on to another prep school.) At Emerson College in Boston he plunged headlong into improv comedy, continuing to do so in L.A. until he found his true home in New York at one of the countrys premier sketch and improv communities, The Upright Citizens Brigade. The UCBs alumni include Amy Poehler, Kate McKinnon, Donald Glover, Aziz Ansari, and Adam Pally. The hit TV show 30 Rock followedAnthony was a cast member for nearly seven years.

It also helps that Atamanuik has a feel for politics and for the breadth of the American experience. I know, because we have talked a lot of politics. He knows it cold, and from all sides. In high school, he ran forand wonthe student presidency. As a boy in Boston, hed hang out in New Hampshire to sample the presidential primary. He befriended Republican Bill Weld in Massachusetts; while working at the legendary Johns Pizza restaurant in New Yorks Greenwich Village, he became friends with New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. After leaving 30 Rock, Anthony took an odd but useful detour, doing a sketch show called the B.S. of A, produced by Glenn Becks The Blaze website, one of the most popular on the right. Working on that show was a great lesson in understanding the other side, he told me, and understanding the benefit of a healthy tension between right and left in this country.

Of course, Donald Trump isnt into healthy tension. He is into tension, which is enervating for the country and the media, not to mention NATO, but also a source of humor. I first saw Anthony as Trump inappropriately enough, New Hampshire. It was the 2016 campaign season, on a snowy February night at the Shaskeen pub on Elm Street in Manchester. Trump and Bernie Sanders were on the rise in the state, as it happened, and Anthony and his friend James Adomian had gone on a national road tour with a debate between Anthony as Trump and James as Sanders. Real journalists would play moderator, following a very loose, bare-bones set of topics and intro lines. Wearing deliberately cheap and obvious wigs and makeup, the two would improvise their way through more than an hour of hilarious back-and-forth. The thirty-city tour was a success (I was honored to play moderator once), and the show was recorded live at a theater in Brooklyn. It debuted at number one on iTunes upon its release.

Anthony is now best known for The President Show, which launched on Comedy Central in 2017. The idea is pure gold: that the president, fed up with being crushed by the late-night comedy talk shows, hosts his own from the Oval Office, with the ever-pliable Mike Pence, played by Peter Grosz, as his sycophantic announcer and sidekick and Pally as the oleaginous Don Jr. Taped in front of a live audience in Stephen Colberts old studio, the show is one hysterical bit after another, every one of them full of insight about Trump and the societal wreckage he is causing. But something else struck me in my (wholly superfluous) role as a consultant on the show: the hints of pity, sympathy, and even compassion that Anthony shows for what must be the truly miserable experience of living in the skin of Donald Trump. Much of the country is unhappy, but if it is any solace, so is the president, and there is something ruefully funny about that.