Donald Trump might be right about SNL
It’s a sign of a healthy engagement with politics if you occasionally find yourself agreeing with Donald Trump.
Now, I know that sounds as counterintuitive as saying it’s great for your circulation to flee a blazing house fire once a year but hear me out. Sometimes agreeing with Trump is a strong indicator that you’re not doctrinaire in your politics: that you consider individual arguments on their merits rather than simply decide they’re good or bad depending on who delivers them.
Granted, on most matters, foreign and domestic, Donald Trump’s understanding has proved to be perfunctory. He would make us believe it a virtue that he knows very little but reacts instinctively to problems. Yet the result of his finger-in-the-wind approach to policymaking is a Big Beautiful Wall (TBC) that offers no serious solution to immigration and a conciliatory approach towards North Korea that has solved none of the problems of a nuclear-tipped Kim Jong-un. Even when he’s right, Trump will have often backed accidentally into the position (the compromise he supported for Dreamers) and can easily change sides inside 24 hours. It’s why, like the old joke about WW2 Italian tanks, his Press Secretaries seem to have one forward gear and four in reverse.
Where he’s not wrong, however, and has never been wrong, is on the matter of Alec Baldwin and Saturday Night Live. This weekend he responded to the show’s latest Trump sketch with one of his scattergun rants.
It produced this response from Baldwin:
Beginning with Trump, he has almost everything the wrong way around. The notion that the primary target of satire should not be the party and people in power is as laughable as his notion of “fairness” (i.e. attack anybody but him). The idea that a President can somehow mandate who and what comedians can joke about is equally silly. In turn, Baldwin probably overstates the danger, though Trump is certainly too liberal with phrases such as “hit jobs” and “retribution”.
Yet strip away the questions about press freedom, toxic politics, and even the place of social media feuds in modern political debate, Trump does at least touch on one truth that Baldwin would never acknowledge. Saturday Night Live is rarely all that funny and has a long history of being involved in at least one form of collusion.
Let’s start with “funny”. It’s easy to forget that, for all its reputation earned over 44 seasons, Saturday Night Live has always been a very mixed bag. SNL has come to represent the broadest form American comedy, as personified by Will Ferrell and, before him the likes of Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, and Bill Murray. Yet the success of films like Ghostbusters, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack or Anchorman tends to obscure the fact that even its most notable alumni have enjoyed very little critical success.
Most have faded into obscurity whilst others have achieved stardom but on the back of more flops than hits. Even Eddie Murphy, arguably the most critically accomplished of the lot, largely achieved that through his stand-up. If anything, the real surprise is how SNL’s very best (Tina Fey, Kristen Wiig, Will Forte, Bill Hader, and, now, Kate McKinnon) have not scaled the heights of comedic achievement we might have expected. Steve Martin, by contrast, was not a cast member and nor were Robin Williams, Richard Prior, Larry David, Bill Hicks, Jerry Seinfeld… In other words, if you want to be a legend of American comedy, SNL probably isn’t the best place to start.
Instead, SNL has become very good at re-appropriating its own legacy inside pop-culture and restating its own importance. Stars “returning” to SNL has itself become a cultural phenomenon and that has now intensified as the show has started to appropriate the biggest stars to make them semi-official cast members. And that, really, is the reason why Alec Baldwin’s impression of Trump matters. It’s because it’s Alec Baldwin.
In the very same way that the show’s producer, Lorne Michaels, has got Robert De Niro to play Robert Mueller, Ben Stiller to play Michael Cohen, John Goodman to play Rex Tillerson, Melissa McCarthy to play Sean Spicer, Scarlett Johansson to play Ivanka Trump, and, most recently, Steve Martin to play Roger Stone, this is comedy that says more about show business than it does about politics. This is comedic popularism: a rather crass appeal to star power rather than well-crafted satire about consequential issues. A president who was a B-list celebrity with little political experience but considerable star power, is now being played by a B-list Hollywood actor with little comedic experience but considerable star power. Ability, it seems to say, is still secondary to celebrity.
Baldwin might be feted, then, but his Trump is one dimensional compared with the best impersonators out there. Anthony Atamanuik on Comedy Central’s The President’s Show is note-perfect (and also delivers properly sharp satire). He doesn’t just speak in that husky voice that is nearly all of Baldwin’s Trump shtick. Atamanuik has every nuance of Trump’s vocal delivery but also marries them with a physical performance that captures the strange poses of the man. He waxes and wanes as Trump crests or dips between the waves of emotion. He goes strident and soft, detached and then personable, giving a dynamic range that rarely hits a false note.
Then there’s John Di Domenico, considered by some to be the godfather of Trump impersonators. He’s been playing The Donald since 2004 and brings all those years of study to the role. It’s not just about getting the hair and makeup right (white panda patches around the eyes are a must) but the way the voice raises breathlessly from the back of the throat to climb in the higher reaches of the nasal cavity where it disappears in that trademark strangled croak.
Baldwin is not even the best Trump that has appeared on SNL. Darrell Hammond played the role before him and was another who didn’t settle for the perpetual pout. He got the silences as right as he got the voice. Not that it ultimately mattered. The story of how Hammond was fired has been repeated often and he has subsequently described his shock and slide into depression after learning that Baldwin would become the face of Trump on the show.
And that, at the heart of it, is the problem with SNL. Baldwin’s role reveals the profound lack of self-awareness of producers who have contributed – indeed, colluded – to creating a toxic environment in which people like Trump achieve fame. It is the very same New York token liberalism that now threatens to undermine the Democratic Party, whose agenda has almost entirely been hijacked by a first-term congresswoman with a particularly deft way with social media. For all the talk of a new kind of politics, we are not seeing anything that doesn’t move beyond a Trumpian popularism of the Left. What else explains why the greatest prize for a Democratic candidate is now the endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? It’s certainly not explained by sensible, mature, and rational politics. It is explained by exposure, marketing, and, for want of a better word, showbiz. AOC hosting SNL? Don’t bet against it.
If Trump is a product of everything that’s faddish about American culture, it’s a faddishness that is, in its way, embodied by Saturday Night Live; the show that enjoyed making a spectacle of Trump when he guest hosted the show back in 2004 and then again in 2015. SNL in the Trump years has continued to chase the celebrity tail, arguably with even greater enthusiasm, barking out a populist message that does nothing to address the real problem, which is a culture less interested in what is written on the famous cue cards than the celebrity of the person asked to read them live every Saturday night.
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