They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. One day in 2023, Shawn Farash got the chance to test that notion in what may have been the biggest moment of his career.
The 33-year-old Trump impressionist had just made an appearance at a fundraiser for January 6 defendants at the then-former president’s golf club in Bedminster, NJ. Towards the end of the event, Trump made some brief remarks from the stage. As he was beginning to leave, one of the event’s hosts pointed to Farash and said, “Excuse me, Mr. President, this young man has something to say to you.” Responding to the call of duty, a star-struck Farash returned to the podium and went with the first thing that popped in his head: a poop joke. “I made a little joke about how we’re going to help win in a landslide, ‘worse than Chris Christie after Taco Bell,’” Farash said, slipping into his version of Trump’s voice in the last clause. “He laughed. The whole room exploded. He shook my hand and said, ‘that was very good.’” (Here’s the video.)
While he considers himself an activist first, Farash’s career has been buoyed by his uncanny ability to replicate the president’s unique speaking style, attracting a following on TikTok that he was able to parlay into a career as a podcast host on the Live From America TV (LFA TV) network. And even though he’s unapologetic about his support for Trump’s presidency, he hopes that by making people laugh, he can start to bridge a partisan divide.
“The best comments I’ve ever gotten are liberals saying, ‘I don’t like Trump, I probably don’t like you, but that was funny,’” Farash said. “That, to me, is kind of reaching across the aisle a little bit.”
Loud and Proud
Farash says that he discovered his knack for imitating Trump’s voice in 2015 and 2016, while he was selling DirecTV subscriptions on his native Long Island. One of the most common concerns Farash heard from prospective customers was that they would lose Fox News. To reassure them, he would coo, “I would never take it away from you, I would never do that” in Trump’s voice, getting a laugh and a sale simultaneously.
In 2020, Farash co-founded the Long Island-based protest group Loud Majority with Kevin Smith, which staged pro-Trump caravans and swarmed local school board meetings to rail against mask and vaccine mandates, and gender-neutral bathrooms. Farash would slip into his Trump impression during protest livestreams, and on the podcast he and Smith co-hosted. The bit proved so popular that he eventually started a TikTok devoted to the imitations.
Loud Majority was eventually labeled an “extreme anti-government group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (a classification Farash takes exception to, given that the group was non-violent), but whatever negative attention the group received was outweighed by the positive. In 2022, he and Smith were approached by LFA TV founder Jeremy Harrell, who offered the Loud Majority podcast a slot on his burgeoning network. The show ran on Rumble beginning in September 2022. After moving to Tennessee, Farash started his own podcast, “Ungoverned,” which runs weekday mornings on LFA TV’s Rumble channel.
According to Farash, “Ungoverned” averages between 15,000 and 20,000 viewers per day, while LFA TV’s Rumble channel receives eight million views a month and raises revenue via ads, subscription fees, and donations.
The Art of the Weave
Young, thin, and sporting long brown hair and a beard, Farash doesn’t look much like the famously blonde and full-bodied commander-in-chief. But thanks to their shared New York heritage, he can easily slip into Trump’s Queens-bred bleat.
To hear Farash tell it, though, the most important part of a Trump impression isn’t necessarily the voice. Rather, it’s mastering his unique cadence and rhythm, specifically what’s been branded as “the weave.”
“He starts on a topic, goes way out, finds a way to talk about three or four other things along the way, and brings it back,” Farash said. “If the topic is the border, he’ll talk about a wall, and how he’s going to build it and then other things that he’s built, and why what he’s built is so great, and who he knew that built things that weren’t as great, and who he got along really well with, and that’s why he’s going to build a great wall. It’s that, ‘level one, level two, level three, level four, level five, let’s bring it back to the topic.’”
Trump fans and foes alike seem to agree that Farash has tapped into something special. When he’s not hosting “Ungoverned,” Farash stays busy by recording personal voice and video messages as Trump for a clientele that he says ranges from liberals looking to delight their Trump-loving relatives to conservatives hoping to troll Trump haters. He charges $50 for a personal audio message; $75 for a video. Businesses get hit with a $250 tab. In addition to recording up to 30 of these messages a month, he also books corporate and political appearances, such as a recent event for Vivek Ramaswamy’s Ohio gubernatorial campaign.
In addition to Trump, Farash has also been known to imitate other politicians like Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and Nancy Pelosi (the latter of which is an unlikely fan favorite). But the president’s voice is the only one that he notices creeping into his everyday life.
“If I’m on the phone with customer service and they’re telling me something maybe I don’t like, I find myself going [Trump voice] ‘excuse me, excuse me, excuse me,’” Farash said. “My wife has to tell me to stop, like, ‘you can’t do Trump to them.’ But I’m like, ‘I can do Trump to whoever I want!’”
Michael Lovito is a Brooklyn-based reporter and critic whose work has appeared in Salon, Brooklyn Magazine, Pavement Pieces, and The District. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the politics and pop culture website The Postrider. @MLovito
