One of the most significant things to come from Donald Trump's journey to the presidency is the increase in popularity of his Twitter account. Throughout his campaign, tweets from up to five years ago resurfaced, with the aid of the internet, contradicting what he would say during debates and what he said his policies as president would be. Trump's Twitter account has also come under scrutiny for another thing: his blatant criticism of individuals, news networks and even TV shows.
From Trump's campaign emerged a new era of NBC's long-running "Saturday Night Live." The show has done sketches involving politicians before, but the popularity of the show was taken to a whole other level with the emergence of Alec Baldwin's Trump impression, and with Kate McKinnon's Hillary Clinton impression. With a wig and a little bit of makeup, it would be difficult to initially distinguish Baldwin from Trump. He undeniably nails it, even mimicking Trump's facial expressions and hand gestures. Saturday Night Live has had other people do impressions of Clinton before, the most well-known one being Amy Poehler, and the success of it only sky-rocketed after Kate McKinnon took on the part. Both of these impressions are hilarious and absolutely brilliant, and if you don't believe it then you can watch all of the sketches, with millions of views, on YouTube.
Usually, when a politician is used as the punchline in a joke, they ignore it or laugh at it as well because it is impossible to not be made fun of when under scrutiny from the entire world. A popular example of this is "Thanks, Obama." Former president Barack Obama took this sarcastic phrase and joked along with everyone else, and then eventually used the same phrase in a popular sketch on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon." These jokes and impressions do not stem from a place of disgust and hatred, but from one that wishes to acknowledge the fact that politicians do and say crazy things, and that we should be critical of them, and that we should also remain light-hearted and hopeful despite this. However, Donald Trump has not taken any of the jokes from "Saturday Night Live" very well, at all.
In his tweets against the show, he has said that Baldwin's impression of him "stinks," and even claimed that the media was rigging the election back in October of 2016. He has referred to the show as "boring and unfunny," calling for it to be canceled. Most recently, he tweeted "'Saturday Night Live' is the worst of NBC. Not funny, cast is terrible, always a complete hit job," in reference to the January 17 cold open, which focused on the failure of Trump's first press conference.
Trump is not the first political figure to be made fun of on SNL, and he will not be the last. Impressions of politicians on "Saturday Night Live" go back years, with people like Dana Carvey portraying George H. W. Bush and Phil Hartman as Bill Clinton. The show even had Molly Shannon portray Monica Lewinsky, and never came under fire from Bill Clinton for publicizing an already extremely public scandal. The fact of the matter is that "Saturday Night Live" has been extremely successful since it first aired in 1975. Pressure from Donald Trump's Twitter account will not change that, and it will not make people stop using Trump as a punch line.
