The Truth About Viral Trump Impersonator, Sarah Cooper

If you always wondered what it would take to pack up and walk away from a lucrative career from a company like Google, you could always ask comedian Sarah Cooper, who has become an internet sensation for her impression of President Donald Trump. 

Cooper's parents are both Jamaican (Famous Birthdays notes her mother is half-German, and her father is half-Chinese). She had a theater scholarship to the University of Maryland, and then moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she became a business student. Her bio lists her as having worked for both Yahoo! and Google, where she was reportedly considered a consensus builder. "I would just repeat what other people said and come to an agreement," she says. "I didn't want to rock the boat" (Vanity Fair). 

Cooper's claim to fame at Google was for her work in designing user interfaces, including the toolbar for Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. "It was kind of ironic that I felt like I was giving up on my dream," Cooper says on Recode Decode (via Vox). "A lot of other people's dreams is to work at Google, so my fallback career is other people's idea of a great career." 

Cooper's business experience in corporate America provided her with enough material for a blog, The Cooper Review. She's also the author of two books: 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings, published in 2016; followed by How to be Successful without Hurting Men's Feelings, which came out in 2018. The latter book, "illustrates how women can achieve their dreams, succeed in their careers, and become leaders, without harming the fragile male ego" (via Amazon). 

The book also features a section on gaslighting, which is what happens when someone tries to get a person or a group of people to question their memory or their own reality (via NBC News). "There's a whole chapter on gaslighting and how we can do it better. It's a whole how-to, 'Gaslighting for Beginners.' My husband does this to me all the time; I'll say, 'I don't think this works' and he'll say, 'Literally no one has that opinion,'" she tells Vox.

While Cooper has a heavy social media presence on Twitter and YouTube, she didn't really become a household name until April 2020, when she began lip syncing to the president on TikTok. 'The first sound bite I did is still one of my favorites. In it, I, as Trump, say, 'We're gonna form a committee. I'm gonna call it a committee. And we're gonna make decisions. And we're gonna make decisions fairly quickly. And I hope they're going to be the right decisions.' Absolute nonsense. But it was exhilarating to play the most powerful man in the world and expose him as the clueless snake-oil salesman he is," Cooper, no fan of the president, tells InStyle. 

Her comedy has resonated with a wide audience, including Trump supporters, in a situation that she calls "confusing." But she must be doing something right. Once a full-time Google employee and part-time comedian, she is now a full time comedian with Sarah Cooper: Everything's Fine premiering on Netflix in the fall — just in time for the election (via The Verge).