RSN Fundraising Banner
FB Share
Email This Page
add comment
Print

Fitzpatrick writes: "Trump's latest rage against Saturday Night Live crossed a line, according to impressionist Alec Baldwin."

Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live. (photo: NBC)
Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live. (photo: NBC)


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.”

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.

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.

Email This Page

e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
Email This Page

 

THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.

RSNRSN