Saturda Night Live has, for the past 45 years, been the home of some of the most toothless political satire to ever fill the air. It just isn’t what the show does well. The show has parodied every president since it debuted in 1975, but the most famous parodies were completely divorced from reality; Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford was an uncoordinated clod while Ford himself was an All-Star football player in college, and George Bush, unlike Dana Carvey, never said “Not gonna do it, wouldn’t be prudent.”
This tradition continues today with Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of Donald Trump; Baldwin nails Trump’s mannerisms, but Trump isn’t dumb in an entertaining way the way George W Bush was, so SNL mostly has nothing to say. Despite the fact that SNL‘s Trump parodies are neither particularly funny or particularly insightful, they really piss Donald Trump off.
Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! 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!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2019
Baldwin told #resistance dork Scott Dworkin on his podcast that this particular tweet made him fear for his safety, via The Guardian:
“People would say to me early on, do you have any concerns about retaliation, not necessarily from the government or from Trump, but from his agitators?” said Baldwin. “I always said not really, I didn’t really think that was something that was real, until now, when he made this comment about retribution and he thought SNL should be investigated.”
Baldwin said the president’s hostile language functioned as “codes”.
“Trump signals people, not necessarily what to do, but how to feel, and that’s the beginning. The beginning is you make people angry, the beginning is you make people agitated and bitter and then the actions flow from there.”
That’s somewhat legitimate, some dude in Kentucky just got busted planning an insane act of domestic terrorism targeting Trump’s political enemies. But it’s not like this is unique to Trump, either; John Hinckley tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan because he thought it would impress Jodie Foster, and that was way before Twitter existed.
Hope you get whacked, you nasty drunken racist