When NBC made the weird and complicit decision to let Donald Trump host Saturday Night Live (not to mention getting Jimmy Fallon to tousle his hair on air), they played a large role in the normalization of Trump in the eyes of many Americans.
It’s a small comfort then to know that not only was the episode terrible, but everyone hated having him there in the first place. You may have already assumed that was the case, but Taran Killam has now confirmed it.
In an interview with Brooklyn Magazine, Killam was speaking about Hamilton, since he’s currently performing as King George in the New York run. He and the interviewer than got onto Mike Pence’s experience with the show, getting called out by the cast when he attended late last year. And even though Pence was the one in the room where it happened, it was “the ~president~” who was the most upset.
Killam’s response? “Yeah, well, the president is a moron.”
Killam wasn’t just on Saturday Night Live when Trump hosted; he played the man before Alec Baldwin took over. And from the sound of it, having Trump around was not great for anyone, Trump included.
It was not fun, and most of the cast and writers were not excited to have him there. I didn’t get the feeling that he was excited to be there, and it felt like a move for ratings from both sides. He was…
Oh boy, how to even finish that sentence?
He was… everything you see. What you see is what you get with him, really. I mean, there was no big reveal. He struggled to read at the table read, which did not give many of us great confidence. Didn’t get the jokes, really. He’s just a man who seems to be powered by bluster.
The “struggled to read” bit is something we’ve heard before. There is, of course, nothing to be made fun of when it comes to learning disabilities. But is that what Killam’s describing? Trump’s relationship with reading has always seemed rooted in an anti-intellectual view of the world and a great mental laziness than anything else. Not only does he reportedly not read his own executive orders, but he’s said that he doesn’t really read books at all. His favorite book is his own The Art of the Deal, and the only other books he’s mentioned reading through the campaign season or since are All Quiet on the Western front and Unlikeable: The Problem With Hillary.
That’s the man running our country. The one who doesn’t like books and doesn’t get jokes. If only we could harness “bluster” as a sustainable energy source. Cause that’s one thing we’ve got in abundance now.
(via Uproxx, image: NBC)
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