Harry Shearer Presents His Take on Trump on New Videos, Album

The computer-generated Donald Trump that stars in Harry Shearer’s videos.

The comic actor has spent the last four years obsessing over the president like everybody else, but he had an outlet for his outrage.

For the last four years, much of the country has obsessed over Donald Trump. His successful bid for The White House reportedly surprised him and his team as much as it did Democrats who went into Election Day 2016 feeling confident he couldn’t win. But Trump failed up again, and social media has spent the last four years chewing on every malignant minute of his presidency, trying to make sense of the man reportedly described by former Chief of Staff John Kelly as “the most flawed person” he’s ever met. 

Comedian and actor Harry Shearer has obsessed over him too, but unlike most of us, he has an outlet other than Facebook and Twitter for banging on the president. Shearer has his weekly radio show, “Le Show,” and throughout Trump’s presidency, Shearer has recorded songs for it that present his take on Trump and his inner circle. At the start of 2020, he took some of his favorites to his producer CJ Vanston and they got musicians in Los Angeles and New Orleans to remake the songs and bring them to life with Shearer singing as the president. This summer, he began releasing videos for the songs weekly. Last Friday, he released the final one—“He Lied”—and the 13 songs will be collected for his upcoming album, The Many Moods of Donald Trump.

“[That title] is a joke because we all know there’s only one mood,” Shearer says.

Shearer is best known as an actor in Christopher Guest’s films, as the voice of Mr. Burns and Ned Flanders on The Simpsons, and as Derek Smalls in This is Spinal Tap. He’ll join Galactic as Smalls to play the first show of season two of Tipitinas.TV on October 31. Shearer has been doing “Le Show” since 1983, and it has given him a home for his satirical songs. In 2009 he won a Grammy for songs riffing on another president—Songs of the Bushmen—and he has released a number of comedy albums including 2012’s Can’t Take a Hint and 2018’s Smalls’ Change, which Shearer performs as the older, not necessarily wiser Spinal Tap bassist. 

He takes the music seriously and works to make sure that it serves the comedy. On The Many Moods of Donald Trump, Shearer wanted the music to resonate, but since Trump has never given us a reason to think there is music he cares about, the best Shearer could do was employ styles he would have heard. He loosely modeled his ‘tribute’ to Jared Kushner, “Son-in-Law,” on Ernie K-Doe’s classic “Mother-in-Law,” and “‘Acquittal’ to me was kind of a triumphant prog anthem,” Shearer says. “On the other hand, the up portion of’ COVID-180’ seems like the kind music he might have heard in Studio 54, and the down verses were like if someone turned on a rock station in 1974 and there was this Neil Young-ish, plaintive stuff going on. ‘Stormy Daniels’ seemed like the torch ballad he would have heard in Sinatra world. A lost-love song with no love.”

Shearer has played every president since Richard Nixon over the course of his career. He played Nixon in the 2014 series, Nixon’s the One, debuted in England before being shown in America as a YouTube series. It presents a darkly funny look inside the Nixon White House with scenes shot to look as though they were captured by hidden cameras and dialogue based on transcripts of Nixon’s White House recordings. 

“Nixon in private is like Trump in public,” he says. “The only difference is that Nixon believed that he had to maintain this facade of decorum and propriety and all that. Trump doesn’t give a fuck about that stuff.”

He sees Nixon and Trump as driven by resentments—Nixon for the wealthy, educated East Coast elite whose cultured circle he couldn’t understand or enter; and Trump for the financial elite in Manhattan that rejected him as an arriviste from Queens, no matter how opulent his projects. That kind of understanding of what motivates them helps Shearer make sure that his performances aren’t simply a collection of verbal tics and facial prosthetics, but it also makes him wonder about what might happen if Trump loses the election. 

“He’s built his psychological scaffolding on the idea of winning,” Shearer says. “What’s going to happen to him if he experiences the most famous loss in the world? It quite possibly could be an existential break for him.”

Shearer has released lyric videos for each of the songs, and he worked with a visual effects studio in Australia to create videos featuring a computer-generated version of Trump for some of the songs. “I was recording my performances, and they were transmogrified technically into the face and body of Donald Trump,” he says. The process distorts Trump satirically to hone in on key characteristics, just as Shearer’s songs do. He appears doughy, lumpy, and awkward, so when Shearer/Trump gestures in time while singing “Son-in-Law,” he’s as stiff and stagey as the real Trump “dancing” to “Y.M.C.A.” 

“America has never had a President so demanding of our continued attention,” Shearer says. “I decided to give him too much of mine.” That time has largely been homework though and not simply the fuel for rage-Tweeting. He has a musical friend who has been regularly 86’ed by Facebook for intemperate responses to Trump outrages, but Shearer has been able to avoid such a fate by channeling his outrage into “Le Show” and these songs. He doesn’t watch Trump as a form of self-flagellation or to keep almost four-year-old wounds fresh. 

“I’m observing him for my own nefarious use,” he says.