Can U.S. President Donald Trump laugh at a joke at his own expense?
Not if it’s coming from NBC’s satirical Saturday Night Live show and Trump impersonator Alec Baldwin, who has periodically contorted his face and snarled his way to fame mocking the 45th president.
On Saturday night Baldwin was jabbing at Trump again, a day after Trump declared a national emergency to divert money in the government’s budget to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border without congressional authorization.
“You all see why I gotta fake this emergency, right? I have to because I want to,” Baldwin said as the sketch show opened. “It’s really simple.
We have a problem. Drugs are coming into this country through no wall.”
But Baldwin as Trump said, “Wall works, wall makes safe. You don’t have to be smart to understand that in fact it’s even easier to understand if you’re not that smart.”
The fake president mimicked Trump’s singsong voice during part of his Friday news conference announcing the national emergency.
“I’ll immediately be sued and the ruling will not go in my favor and then it will end up in the Supreme Court and then I’ll call my buddy [Brett] Kavanaugh (a justice appointed by Trump) and I’ll say, It’s time to repay the Donny,’ and he’ll say, new phone, who dis?'” Baldwin joked.
But by then, Baldwin-as-Trump said, a report by special counsel Robert Mueller, who has been investigating links between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, “will be released, crumbling my house of cards and I can plead insanity and do a few months in the puzzle factory and my personal hell of playing president will finally be over.”
The show also lampooned the results of Trump’s recent annual physical exam.
“I’m still standing 6-7, 185 pounds — shredded,” Baldwin said, although Trump actually is several centimeters shorter and weighs more than 110 kilograms, defined by U.S. health standards as obese.
Trump gave the sketch and the show a thumbs down.
“Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!” Trump said on Twitter. “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 RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” he tweeted minutes later.
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