Laura Benanti: My Melania Trump impression aims to be sympathetic, not cruel

The Washington Post

The Tony Award-winning Benanti recurs as the first lady on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where she sometimes pitches ideas of her own to Colbert's writers. “I think of her as America,” Benanti told Variety's Stagecraft podcast. “I think the only way to make it a truly enjoyable thing to watch, rather than making fun of her and being cruel to her, is to have her actually be one of us. And by ‘one of us,’ I mean the people who feel like we’re reluctantly married to him and don’t want to be.”