Last night, Saturday Night Live brought Alec Baldwin back to reprise his role as Donald Trump. Baldwin recreated Trump’s rose garden speech declaring a national emergency to build the wildly unpopular border wall. The declaration comes after congress refused to grant the president $5 billion for the wall.
What’s wild about our current political moment is that its ridiculousness almost transcends satire. SNL was game to give it a try, poking fun at the president’s broken syntax, his rambling speech, and his tangent about China’s death penalty. Baldwin said, “We need wall, because wall works. Wall makes safe. You don’t need to be smart to understand that, in fact it’s easier to understand if you’re not that smart.” He followed up by saying, “you can all see why I gotta fake this national emergency, right? I have to because I want to.”
Baldwin followed up by imitating Trump’s singsong version of the national emergency going to courts, getting struck down, and finally hitting the Supreme Court. He said, “And the ruling will not go in my favor. And then it’ll end up in the Supreme Court. And then I’ll call my buddy Kavanaugh. And I’ll say, it’s time to repay the Donny. And he’ll say, ‘New phone, who dis?’ And then the Mueller report will be released. Crumbling my house of cards. And I can just plead insanity. And my personal hell of playing president will finally be over.”
It was a solid cold open, skewering Trump and his national emergency. One person who was not a fan of the skit, was Trump himself. The president took time out of his busy national emergency golf weekend at Mar-a-Lago to tweet his feelings:
Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2019
THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2019
This isn’t the first time that Trump has mocked SNL, a show that he has hosted twice. But while it’s easy to make fun of Trump’s thin skin, it is also disturbing that he refers to SNL‘s political humor as “collusion.” Complaining about your portrayal in press and popular culture is something that authoritarian dictators do. The long-running series has criticized every president in office, yet Trump is the first one to complain about it.
Trump’s favoritism of dictators and censorship is nothing new, but it remains alarming and anti-democratic. For a man who loves insulting others, Trump can dish it but he sure can’t take it.
(via Slate, image: screencap)
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