Alec Baldwin gets paid $1,400 per appearance to portray Donald Trump on “Saturday Night Live.”
For an A-list star like Baldwin, the money is inconsequential. An outspoken liberal, Baldwin uses his interpretation of Trump to criticize and satirize him.
Baldwin continued to do just that on the most recent episode of “SNL.”
The episode opened with a reenactment of Trump’s first press conference since the election, and Baldwin and the cast of “SNL” had plenty of material to work with.
Baldwin’s first statement as the president-elect was an answer to a question that people have asked themselves many times during Trump’s time in the political spotlight.
“Yes this is real life, this is really happening,” Baldwin said in his spot on portrayal of Trump.
The cold open hit on many of the important topics that were covered during the press conference and that had been in the news as of late, such as the difficulty in getting high profile celebrities to attend and perform at his inauguration.
“We’ve also got some huge A-list actors coming like Angelina Jolie, Ryan Gosling and Jennifer Lawrence. They will all be at my inauguration, courtesy of Madame Tussauds.” Baldwin said.
Also included throughout the sketch were many mentions of the recent “Golden Showers” scandal that recently surfaced in the news.
The episode was not lacking in puns about the incident. In an attempt to turn the topic away from the “pee pee,” in typical Trump fashion, Baldwin averted the conversation to creating jobs, where he stated that he would create the “biggest, strongest, steadiest stream of jobs.”
When Baldwin-as-Trump was accused of repealing Obamacare without a replacement plan, he defended himself by saying he did have a replacement plan in place, called the Affordable Care Act (the original name for Obamacare). After hearing that if he repealed Obamacare people would die, Baldwin said, “Listen, sweetheart, I’m about to be president, we are all about to die.”
“SNL” and Baldwin also tackled Trump’s refusal to answer questions from CNN at his press conference, and his distaste for BuzzFeed. In the sketch, Baldwin said he loved the press, and then refused to answer questions from CNN or BuzzFeed.
“I’m not a Joey, I’m a Rachel” he said in reference to a BuzzFeed quiz which Baldwin said he was dissatisfied with the results of.
In another highlight of the sketch, Kenan Thompson reprised his role as Steve Harvey after Baldwin said he had hired an African-American icon to help Ben Carson in his new cabinet position.
“It’s me, Steve Harvey,” Thompson said. “Yeah, I do government now.” He then asked the audience if this would bode well for the country, and in typical “Family Feud” fashion, three x’s popped up on the screen.
The press conference ended with a question from Beck Bennett, who was playing a shirtless Vladimir Putin. Saying he was “American journalist Wolf Blitzer,” he asked if Russia was really behind the hacking, all the while holding up a video tape with the label “pee pee tape” written on it.
“It was China,” Baldwin said in reply. “uh I mean Canada.. It was Meryl Streep. This press conference is over.”
Trump has yet to respond to the sketch, though he does have a history of having negative reactions to Baldwin’s portrayal of him on “SNL.”
Whether he gets a response from Trump or not, it is no doubt Baldwin’s portrayal of Trump is one of the most entertaining things on TV right now. It's huge.
