Trump Freaks Out Over Latest SNL Cold Open

Saturday Night Live mocked the President's declaration of a 'national emergency," which caused him to lash out on Twitter.

Last night, the Saturday Night Live cold open once again featured Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump:

“Saturday Night Live” during its latest episode took aim at President Trump’s “fake” national emergency to fund a wall along the southern border.

Alec Baldwin, impersonating Trump, mocked the president’s justification for diverting funds from the military to build a border wall.

“We have a tremendous amount of drugs flowing into the country from the southern border—or the brown line as many people have asked me not to call it,” Baldwin said. “That’s why we need wall. Because wall works. Wall makes safe.”

He later stated that “you can all see why I have to fake this national emergency.”

“I have to because I want to. It’s really simple. We have a problem,” Baldwin added, before saying that he’s “basically taking military money so I can has wall.”

“So I’m going to sign these papers for emergency,” he continued. “And then I will immediately be sued and the ruling will not go in my favor and it will end up in the Supreme Court and I’ll call my buddy [Brett] Kavanaugh and I’ll say it’s time to repay the Donny, and he will say, ‘New phone, who dis?’ Then the Mueller report will be released, crumbling my house of cards and I can just plead insanity.

“And my personal hell of being president will finally be over.”

The skit from Baldwin, who has repeatedly impersonated Trump throughout his presidency, came just a day after Trump declared a national emergency to allocate nearly $8 billion for construction of his long-sought border wall.

Here’s the video:

This apparently bothered the President, because he reacted angrily on Twitter:

President Trump early Sunday accused major news networks of engaging in “collusion” against his administration, asking how NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” could get away with “hit jobs” without “retribution.”

“Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!” Trump tweeted. “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!”

The tweet from Trump came just hours after “Saturday Night Live” took aim at his move to declare a national emergency to fund the construction of his long-promised border wall.

Actor Alec Baldwin, who has repeatedly impersonated Trump throughout his presidency, called the emergency “fake” and called out many of the justifications Trump used to support it.

“We have a tremendous amount of drugs flowing into the country from the southern border — or the brown line, as many people have asked me not to call it,” Baldwin said as Trump. “That’s why we need wall. Because wall works. Wall makes safe.”

“I have to [sign the emergency declaration] because I want to. It’s really simple. We have a problem,” Baldwin added, before saying that he’s “basically taking military money so I can has wall.”

Trump has continually criticized the media during his two years in the White House, and suggested last September that NBC’s “license” be challenged.

Here are the President’s tweets in the wake of the SNL sketch:

Let’s think a bit about what we’re seeing here. The President of the United States is so upset about a six-minute bit on a late-night Saturday comedy show that he decided to rant and rave about it on Twitter early in the morning. Most likely, of course, he probably didn’t see it live but saw coverage of it on Fox News Channel this morning as he got his morning dose of adulatory propaganda from a network that has become nothing but the Communications Office for the Trump Administration. A normal President, indeed a normal human being, would have let such a comedy bit slide, or in the style of a Ronald Reagan, who was good friends with Johnny Carson even as Carson ribbed him nightly in his monologue, or a George H.W. Bush, who famously invited Dana Carvey to the White House to do his impersonation after Bush lost the 1992 election and even once participated in an SNL cold open with Carvey doing his George Bush character (something that Carvey remembered in a statement after Bush died in December), he might have even laughed it off. After all, making fun of politicians is a time-honored American tradition that has been engaged in by comedians and humorists going back to H.L. Mencken, Will Rogers, and Mark Twain, and long before that. If you’re going to survive in an office like the Presidency without completely losing it, you have accept the fact that people are going to make fun of you. The fact that this President can’t accept that says as much about him as any of his other tweets, speeches, or actions as President and it says a lot about him as a human being, none of it very good.

Besides, if Trump is going to blow up every time someone makes fun of him, then the next two years aren’t going to be good for his blood pressure, so my advice to the President would be pretty simple:

FILED UNDER: Entertainment, Humor, Popular Culture, The Presidency, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , ,
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. CSK says:

    What do you expect from a man (sort of) who’s still obsessing 30-plus years after the fact that Graydon Carter called him a “short-fingered vulgarian”? Trump is a desperately insecure failed social climber, and we’re all paying the price for that.

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  2. Kylopod says:

    Let’s think a bit about what we’re seeing here. The President of the United States is so upset about a six-minute bit on a late-night Saturday comedy show that he decided to rant and rave about it on Twitter early in the morning.

    His inability to tolerate being the subject of humor may be one of the factors that got us to where we are now. The 2011 White House dinner, when Obama and Seth Meyers literally made fun of Trump to his face, is often cited as a pivotal moment in Trump’s quest for the White House. In the immediate aftermath, of course, he announced he was not running for president that year. It came just after Obama had released his long-form birth certificate and announced the death of Osama Bin Laden–sending Trump’s poll numbers (which initially had placed him at the front of the GOP field) crashing down. But Trump holds grudges forever (he spent decades harassing the humorist who once called him a “short-fingered vulgarian”), and it’s very likely his desire to destroy Obama’s legacy started there.

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  3. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    Okay. But we’ve always know that Trump was thin-skinned, egomaniacal, a largely inept businessman, and in general a low human being. Most of the MAGAots know all of this, too. The difference is that they DGAF.

    By all means, keep posting these types of stories. They are my only link to SNL, but it might be better to shorten them to mocking the current occupant without the moralizing and conclusioning of things about which there are no virgins in the likely audience. We already got that part.

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  4. The abyss that is the soul of cracker says:

    @Concerned Citizen: But probably won’t be. I could probably write the tweets right now without even knowing what McCabe will say, except that I can spell and know grammar.

  5. Slugger says:

    I do wonder what he means by “retribution”? There are a number of possibilities.

  6. CSK says:

    @Slugger:

    Ah, he’s always fulminating about having the libel laws changed. It makes his base happy.

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  7. Mister Bluster says:

    …what he means by “retribution”?

    He has already advocated for political assassination. What else could he be thinking?

    “I think her bodyguards should drop all weapons. Disarm immediately,” Trump said. “Take their guns away, let’s see what happens to her.”
    “Take their guns away, OK? It’ll be very dangerous,” he added.
    CNN

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  8. gVOR08 says:

    Paul Campos at LGM says on this subject,

    It’s impossible to imagine Trump saying something genuinely funny, because genuine wit requires a modicum of various qualities — self-awareness, a sense of the absurd, a sense that other people actually exist, an ability to imagine that there are interesting things in the world other than oneself etc. — that Trump lacks in profound ways.

    It’s something of a truism that conservatives don’t do humor. Lindsay Graham (who may be faking conservative) used to occasionally show a genuine sense of humor. Can you name two other conservative Republican pols who can do humor?

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  9. MarkedMan says:

    It’s no wonder our resident Trumpers are so quiet nowadays. (Don’t confuse Trumpers with a traditional troll, who only wants to goad people into a reaction and doesn’t care in the least about the actual content of the posts.) Added to this: it turns out Trump officials reached out to the Japanese Prime Minister and begged him to nominate Donny-boy for a Nobel Prize. Which he did, and then immediately leaked that he had only done it upon request. Talk about a pity f*ck…

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  10. MarkedMan says:

    @gVOR08:

    It’s something of a truism that conservatives don’t do humor. Lindsay Graham (who may be faking conservative) used to occasionally show a genuine sense of humor.

    If Graham is faking being a conservative he’s doing a pretty dang convincing job. And, although he hasn’t said anything funny in a while, he has had some Barney Frank level zingers in his time. Conservatives can absolutely do humor. But small, petty, angry people cannot.

    I think the reason it’s become a truism that conservatives can’t do humor is because the type of people that call themselves conservatives nowadays tend towards the small, petty and angry. To be funny you have to be willing to laugh at yourself as well as others. And to be really funny in anything other than a standup environment you have to be willing to let someone else get the laugh. Are there conservatives who can be funny? Absolutely. Tom Selleck comes to mind. Mel Gibson. Roseanne Barr (ok, sometimes conservative, sometimes liberal, sometimes just frickin’ nuts). But people who wear their conservative credentials on their sleeves? Could you imagine Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity making a joke at their own expense? And in political humor, you earn the right to mock the opposition by being willing to mock your own. Every liberal late night host has done an Obama imitation, or a Hillary or Bill Clinton one. Can you even conceive of the modern conservative “intelligentsia” mocking Trump? Much less Reagan? Seth Meyers has a segment called something like “Seth Can’t Say That!” where he brings out two of his writers, one a black woman and the other a lesbian, and they tell jokes that Seth can’t. Half of them are at the expense of whites or men or conservatives, and the other half are good natured joshes of black and lesbian culture. Could you conceive of a modern self declared conservative making even a good natured josh of say, the anti-abortion movement? Or the tea party? These are petty and small people with little confidence.

    But the bloggers here would also call themselves conservatives, and while this isn’t really the forum for it, I could easily see them being self deprecating in another context.

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  11. Gustopher says:

    @gVOR08: Humor generally requires transgressing boundaries, or inverting rules and expectations. Genuine conservatives have tighter boundaries and so their humor isn’t going to be funny to the more liberal mainstream. Genuine conservatives probably thought Hee-Haw was hysterical.

    Modern “conservatives” mostly just spend their time punching down and going “hurr, hurr, good one Cletus”.

    A Mormon coworker of mine, funny guy, used to (also) tell jokes about Juggalos. His other stuff was better. Anyway, one day at lunch he explained that he had made a joke over the weekend and his wife responded with “why would gigolos do that?” and he realized that she had been thinking he had been making gigolo jokes for years. He regretted that his first instinct was to correct her.

  12. Kylopod says:

    @MarkedMan: I’ve mentioned it here before, but the first time I truly started to understand the nature of conservative “humor” came from reading a Baltimore sun article in 2004.

    “Not all comedians are angry, bomb-throwing, left-wing types, like Moore, Bill Maher or Janeane Garofalo,” he says. “That’s a myth. Lots of intelligent, educated Americans respect President Bush as a man of strong values and above-average smarts who has dedicated himself to protecting them.

    “And what’s funnier, anyway, than [Democratic presidential candidate] John Kerry saying, in that self-important voice, ‘I voted for the $87 billion [in support of the Iraq war] before I voted against it?’ Liberals are hilarious. Sometimes they just skewer themselves. You don’t have to write their material.”

    Peterkofsky speaks with the rapid-fire delivery of a stand-up comic and has a jokester’s knack for turning a phrase. For example: “Liberals don’t let the facts interfere with a good emotion, while conservatives don’t let emotions interfere with the facts.” ….

    “People have been brainwashed to think conservatives can’t be funny,” says Gorin, who has always felt like a contradiction in terms…. She made a name for herself in the Journal not long after Bill Clinton left office. When the ex-president’s dog was run over and killed outside his Chappaqua, N.Y., home, Gorin’s piece, “Buddy’s Dead; Is Anyone Surprised?” outraged Clinton supporters.

    It’s pretty clear when you read this that these two so-called comedians are brimming with so much contempt for liberals you can practically see the spittle dripping from their jaws. What they’re doing is essentially the Rush Limbaugh playbook: use their stale talking points and narrow stereotypes to turn liberals into such cartoons they become ridiculous. It’s hatred disguised as humor, and has a much closer relationship to schoolyard taunts than to grownup comedy. It also happens to be the overwhelmingly predominant form of “humor” found on the right, to this day.

    One thing I find very telling is that conservatives often seem to have a poor understanding of the very categories of humor. Ann Coulter has been defended as a “satirist.” When Trump warned during the campaign about “Second Amendment people” if he lost, his remark was later described as “sarcastic.” Neither of those characterizations make any sense, and seem fundamentally to be category errors by people who have no idea what satire or sarcasm actually are beyond mechanisms that aren’t meant to be taken 100% literally. I do think Coulter (and Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, and a number of the other talk-radio hosts) do engage in something that could be described as a form of insult comedy–but Don Rickles or Rodney Dangerfield they ain’t.

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  13. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Gustopher: Still do. My former apartment mate binge watches Hee Haw on YouTube.

  14. Kathy says:

    @Slugger:

    I assume he means in a “strong” country, people who make fun of Dear leader would be sent to a gulag.

  15. Pylon says:

    Even Nixon appeared on Laugh In. Trump has less character than Tricky Dick.

    On comedians, I can’t think of a RW comedian I think is funny. There are comic actors who are RW, but their laughs are scripted. Roseanne BTW, was not funny as a standup IMO. Dennis Miller’s routine is painful.

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  16. DrDaveT says:

    @Kylopod:

    “Liberals don’t let the facts interfere with a good emotion, while conservatives don’t let emotions interfere with the facts.”

    To me, the ironic part is that this caricature really was funny — 50 years ago. By 2004, though, it was just Newspeak. It turned out that conservative devotion to facts was contingent on the facts favoring the policies they wanted…

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  17. Kylopod says:

    @DrDaveT: The absurdity of that line is revealed by what he says in the very first paragraph from that excerpt: “Lots of intelligent, educated Americans respect President Bush as a man of strong values and above-average smarts who has dedicated himself to protecting them.”

    That’s a pretty weird thing to say in a discussion about conservative comedy. You wouldn’t expect a liberal comedian to open a discussion of their field by gushing over Obama–not because liberal comedians didn’t like Obama, but because that isn’t a source of comedy. “Obama/Bush is a great president,” agree or disagree, isn’t funny. Humor comes from conflict, from commenting on how things aren’t the way they ought to be.

    The part about Bush having “above-average smarts” is especially a strange thing to say in this context, because it doesn’t sound like much of a compliment (talk about damning with faint praise)–except it’s clearly meant to contradict the liberal comedians who depicted Bush as a moron. So it’s basically the Bush-era equivalent of “very stable genius.” What’s really underlying all this is the stew of conservative resentment, jealousy, and pathological obsession with putting liberals in their place. You can almost hear the “So there!” in his remarks: “I can make a funny too. So there! Bush is a smart guy. So there!” That’s why the line about conservatives not letting emotions interfere with facts comes off so tone-deaf; it is so obviously spoken by someone who doesn’t realize he’s consumed by emotion–bitter, negative emotion. Which might be a potential source of humor if he had an ounce of self-awareness.

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