Alec Baldwin Blasts Trump's SNL Tweet as "Threat to My Safety and That of My Family"

By Kevin Fitzpatrick, Vanity Fair

18 February 19

Trump’s latest rage against Saturday Night Live crossed a line, according to impressionist Alec Baldwin.

here’s “Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC,” or so President Trump bellowed online Sunday morning, hours after the sketch-comedy mainstay took aim at the rambling rose garden presser declaring a national emergency. Nothing seemed particularly new in Alec Baldwin’s impression of the wall-desiring head of state, though Trump’s tirade against media mockery did add troubling hints at “retribution.”

“Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution,” Trump asked in a Sunday morning tweet. “Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!” Minutes later, Trump took on a familiar all-caps tone to lump in Saturday Night Live as an “enemy of the people.”

THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2019

Trump using calls to action in proximity to labeling his critics “enemies” is sadly nothing new, though Baldwin subsequently outlined his concern with the president’s post-show rhetoric. “I wonder if a sitting President exhorting his followers that my role in a TV comedy qualifies me as an enemy of the people constitutes a threat to my safety and that of my family,” Baldwin wrote Sunday night.

I wonder if a sitting President exhorting his followers that my role in a TV comedy qualifies me as an enemy of the people constitutes a threat to my safety and that of my family?

— HABFoundation (@ABFalecbaldwin) February 18, 2019

Baldwin has performed the impression since at least 2016, picking up the role from cast member Taran Killam and announcer Darrell Hammond. And while Trump has long-since bemoaned the impersonation as “boring and unfunny,” his Twitter responses generally veer closer to demand for legal recourse than hints of violence. “A REAL scandal is the one sided coverage, hour by hour, of networks like NBC & Democrat spin machines like Saturday Night Live,” Trump wrote in December 2018. “It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials. Should be tested in courts, can’t be legal?”

As The New York Times writer Peter Baker put it Sunday afternoon, “no other president in decades publicly threatened ‘retribution’ against a television network because it satirized him.” Neither Baldwin nor Saturday Night Live have indicated if they will address President Trump’s “threat” any further.