’Once, Saturday Night Live could take down a president. Now it’s doing Trump a favor.
No one in American politics understands the dark art of ridicule better than Donald Trump. And when it comes to seeing himself on the receiving end, nobody in American politics has a thinner skin. His fury at President Barack Obama’s roasting of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinnerhis own run for the presidency.
The sheer relentlessness of Trump’s disdain suggests that Baldwin’s impersonation must go beyond satire into something more subversive—that the 61-year-old actor is spewing poisonous propaganda against a duly elected leader. But to look back over the full Baldwin/Trump oeuvre since 2016 is to realize just how tame it is—and, in an important way, what a favor it does the president. Baldwin’s Trump bears a closer resemblance to the befuddled governor on the old “Benson” sitcom than it does “Dr.
The hidden influence of this kind of comedy, the widely seen late-night material that ends up as YouTube clips and watercooler fodder, lies in its ability to shape a narrative outside the news, interpreting people’s motives rather than just character. The comedian professes to peel off coats of varnish and reveal an essential but hidden truth. Often that truth is anodyne but amusing, and becomes an instant trope—a predictable laugh line, like Bill Clinton’s lustfulness.
For a franchise built on having an edge, especially when it comes to culture and politics, it might feel like “SNL” has gone soft. But despite its reputation for pushing boundaries, earned mostly in its early, pathbreaking days, “SNL” has only rarely been a source of political blasphemy. When it comes to public figures, it draws more giggles than gasps.
Enter Chevy Chase, the floppy-haired, insouciant writer and sketch comedian who became the show’s first star. He started interpolating falls in which the president tumbles within an inch of his life only to emerge with his chin high, his expression a Peter Sellers-like deadpan. Pretty soon, the show’s opening act every week was Ford falling down, and Chase began enacting other made-up gestures of presidential clumsiness, like hearing a phone ring and putting a full water glass to his ear.
Palin’s flop didn’t deter the Hillary Clinton of 2016 from trying her own version of the Ford approach for dealing with “SNL,” appearing as a world-weary bartender while Kate McKinnon, playing Clinton, soaked up her advice. It was a funny moment, and the real Clinton looked reassuringly human standing behind a bar and calling herself Val. But like a dash of spritzer in a very dry wine, it barely reduced the acidity of McKinnon’s years of skits mocking Clinton as power-hungry and insincere.
Despite his well-known aversion to the president—he has said it pains him to play Trump, and has described the president as a con man, a stooge of Russian President Vladimir Putin and worse—Baldwin unconsciously allows some of himself to spill over into his Trump. When Baldwin’s Trump listens to a barely coherent ramble from Kanye West in afrom late last year, he is in on the joke. “Oooh, this guy might be cuckoo,” he says to himself, in one of Baldwin’s verbal thought bubbles.
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