ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the three most recent Donald Trump impersonators – Darrell Hammond, Taran Killam, and Alec Baldwin – as their sketches double-voice Donald Trump as a political candidate in the primary and general elections. After describing past approaches to studying the perception of sociolinguistic style and the construction of identity, the chapter presents the view that political parody can be seen as a type of metadiscourse. The chapter argues that the linguistic study of parodic performance can provide us with similar information that perception tasks do, because parodies highlight the social meanings that laypeople associate with the linguistic forms they hear. The chapter examines recent popular parodies of Trump on the late-night sketch comedy Saturday Night Live (SNL). It shows that parodies even reify a sociolinguistic variable by rendering it categorical within the parodic frame. The chapter relies on a few salient features in Trump's speech, potentially leaving aside others that are more socially meaningful to other hearers.
