Is President Donald Trump an existential threat to the American experiment, or is he a bumbling, laughable oaf who can’t do anything right? Can James Austin Johnson manage to make him look like both at once?
These are the questions that Saturday Night Live fans are now asking in Season 51 after nearly a decade of uninterrupted parody of the current President. From Taran Killam to Alec Baldwin to Johnson, Saturday Night Live’s official Trump impression has long been a point of discussion in both the show’s fandom and in the fraught American political climate — while Trump and his followers complain about how unfair the sketch show supposedly is towards its favorite parody target, many SNL fans feel that the show isn’t hard enough on the Commander in Chief.
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Recently, the Saturday Night Live subreddit restarted the debate over the show’s ever-changing depiction of Trump when a post titled “Please Stop Humanizing DJT” hit the front page, which gave fans a platform to debate the relationship between parody and politics while also providing a much-needed respite from the fandom’s ongoing roast of the most recent Domingo sketch.
“I think him asking a podcast full of 12 year olds (and one 13 year old unc) if he’s going to heaven out of the blue is perfect level of absurdism to show how crazy he is,” the top commenter opined of Johnson’s most recent performance as Trump in a SNL sketch.
Another fan had a slightly different interpretation, writing of the “Boys Podcast” scene, “The intent of the sketch was to show that he speaks with the same incomprehensible and self-confounding babble as these child hosts.”
Other fans argued that Johnson’s take on the Trump is, for better or worse, profoundly watchable, with one writing, “JAJ’s SNL Trump is to everyone what real Trump is to Republicans.”
However, other SNL watchers argued that, for as enjoyable as Johnson’s performance as the President may be, each sketch involving Trump is perfectly clear in its politics. “In what way has Trump been humanized? In every sketch he’s in he’s an idiot. Are you asking SNL to stop depicting him? Wouldn’t that be worse?” one user asked.
Well, to some SNL fans, the show moving away from Trump depictions would actually be better for their own weekly enjoyment. “How about a break from Trump sketches altogether?” one user suggested, “There’s nothing new to say about him anymore. Leave it to Update. He craves attention, so the best thing to do is ignore him.”
Many more SNL fans agreed with the assessment, saying that constant Trump sketches make them want to stop watching the show. At the same time, other fans argued that, if SNL pretended not to take notice of Trump and Johnson gave his favorite wig a break, the show would be playing right into Trump’s hand at a time when the White House is pressuring media companies into silencing Trump’s comedic critics.
Clearly, the SNL fandom is divided over the show’s treatment of Trump, and the lack of a consensus on the issue highlights the problem that comedians have had with the President for the last ten years. Trump is, simultaneously, too outlandish to parody and too insecure to ignore any attention he gets, positive or negative. Meanwhile, the public is so exhausted by a decade of Trump’s antics that the vast majority of jokes made at his expense end up sounding like white noise.
Ultimately, SNL is too slavishly devoted to staying on top of the zeitgeist to ever abandon a proper presidential parody, but it lacks the sharp elbows to really dig into a President whom Lorne Michaels infamously invited to host the show towards the beginning of his political career. For as long as Trump is in power, SNL will be stuck in this loop of constantly parodying him to mixed reviews from the fandom – but, hey, at least we can be thankful that every new Trump sketch is taking up a spot in the running order that could otherwise be ruined by Domingo.
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