Alec Baldwin Defends Playing Trump on SNL During President’s Covid-19 Battle
Alec Baldwin has come out to defend his portrayal of Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live. President Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19 late last week and has been fighting the virus in the hospital. It was previously reported that SNL was scrambling to find a way to address the situation, though they ultimately decided against it. With that being said, they felt that the first 2020 Presidential Debate was still appropriate to tackle.
Alec Baldwin has played Donald Trump on SNL ever since the 2016 campaign and election. The show brought on Jim Carrey to play former Vice President Joe Biden for the 46th season, along with Maya Rudolph, who is playing Kamala Harris. However, with Trump’s illness, many were left wondering if SNL would address him at all. Baldwin had this to say about his choice to portray Trump over the weekend.
“If there was ever the suggestion that Trump was truly, gravely ill, and people said, ‘Trump is really in trouble,’ then I would bet you everything I have that we wouldn’t even get near that, in terms of content of the show. They would have done something else. I’ve seen that happen before.”
Alec Baldwin went on to say, “We only have the words of the White House itself and the people who work there themselves to go on, and all of them have all been saying he isn’t in any danger.” It is surmized that if President Donald Trump was in serious danger of possibly passing away, SNL is likley to have figured out another route. “We only have their word to go by. And if their word was that he was in serious trouble, then we probably wouldn’t have done it,” says Baldwin.
Alec Baldwin and SNL have been criticized for their take on President Donald Trump over the years and this past week’s news cycle proved to be a big challenge for the show. “We thought the debate was something topical, and we didn’t have anything with him in a hospital bed, but we had the debate,” says Baldwin. “You’d have to have a very good reason to avoid that, topicality-wise, and nobody thought that they were mocking somebody’s illness by doing that.”
Regardless, there are still some of Donald Trump’s supporters who are angry with SNL and Alec Baldwin for bringing him up at all. However, there are more than a few who are happy that the show took on the debates, though Alec Baldwin maintains they were not intending to be malicious in any way when addressing the debates and Trump. “There are a lot of people out there who have the deepest amount of animosity I could possibly calculate in my adult life toward Trump, but there’s a line they won’t cross,” says Baldwin. “They wouldn’t say, ‘I wish something happened to him,’ or that he died, or whatever. And people who do that, that’s not the way it should be.” You can head over to Alec Baldwin’s Instagram to see his full explanation.
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