Lockdown videos of Sarah Cooper lip-syncing Donald Trump made her a Twitter sensation. Now the comedian is working with the likes of Helen Mirren and Whoopi Goldberg. She reveals how she ditched Silicon Valley to follow her dreams
You might think the only sort of person who gets famous on TikTok is a teenager caked in bronzing makeup busting out robotic dance moves, not a middle-aged married woman with an economics degree, despairing at her government. But 2020 has brought many surprises, and Sarah Cooper is perhaps the most unlikely of all of them: an American comedian who has appeared out of nowhere and made millions of us actually want to listen to Donald Trump. That is, as long as his voice is coming out of her mouth, in the videos where she lip-syncs and mimes along to his rambling speeches.
“I hate him so much,” she says, smiling calmly as she talks to me over video from New York, where she lives, “but he has provided my greatest material.” Such as the time he imagined, out loud, all the lovely health benefits that might come from imbibing disinfectant. Cooper turns her despair into hilarity when she moves her mouth in perfect timing to his words while looking exactly like herself: a black woman who has never voted Republican in her life.
