A grilled-cheese sandwich over and over again
It takes only seven minutes to turn Alec Baldwin into Donald Trump.
A dusting of Clinique Stay-Matte powder in honey. A hand-stitched wig. Eyebrows glued up into tiny peaks. The rest is left to Alec Baldwin: the puckered lips, a studied lumbering gait and a wariness of humanizing a man he reviles.
The transformation of Mr. Baldwin, an outspoken liberal, into the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, for his running parody on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” entails a tangerine hairpiece and a tricky tightrope walk. It means balancing a veteran actor’s determination to subsume his identity into a character, even as, in his offstage life, he is firm in his belief that the man about to take office is a dangerous figure.
The key to a convincing Mr. Trump, the actor said, are “puffs” — his word for the pregnant pauses in the president-elect’s speech. “I see a guy who seems to pause and dig for the more precise and better language he wants to use, and never finds it.”
Haaaaaaaa exactly. He never finds it because he never had it. He knows how to “make deals” but not how to think or be eloquent.
“It’s the same dish — it’s a grilled-cheese sandwich rhetorically over and over again.”
See Trump couldn’t make that joke or that metaphor, because he doesn’t have that kind of intelligence. There are other kinds of intelligence, certainly, but he doesn’t have those either. He has cunning, but that’s all.
Release your tax returns and I'll stop.
Ha— ABFoundation (@ABFalecbaldwin) December 4, 2016
His Trump is as much censure as impersonation. He does not write the sketches. He is paid $1,400 for each appearance on the show, he said.
“I’m not interested much by what’s inside him,” he said, but in how he moves and takes up space. Mr. Baldwin then amplifies the gestures, and distills them. An emphatic wave becomes a goofy “wax-on, wax-off” movement, he said, the simple hand motion reducing a candidate to an essence: pitchman.
There isn’t anything inside him. I’ve seldom seen anyone so empty in my life.
“I’ve seldom seen anyone so empty in my life.”
Seldom.
I’ve gotta hear who else is in the running…
Yes, that’s the habitual caution of the…the…the kind of blogger who doesn’t want to go into wild exaggeration too often. But yes: I have a hard time thinking of anyone of any public prominence who comes across as that vacant-minded.
That’s a relief… for a second I thought there were more of them.
He does a terrific caricature of Trump
Baldwin’s impression is iconic, not because it’s the most accurate (though it’s pretty close), but because it supplants the original character of Trump in the mind; in effect, Baldwin’s idea of Trump is truer in some transcendental sense than Trump’s presentation of himself. You can see this in how other comedians (most notably Stephen Colbert) have altered their own impressions, either consciously or subconsciously. They’re no longer doing an impression of Trump; they’re doing an impression of Baldwin’s impression.
And $1,400 per week sounds like a bargain for NBC, to boot.
A bargain is putting it mildly. It’s lunch money! I’m impressed that Baldwin does it. Mind you, it must be enormous fun…
He’s like Palin in that respect. All one has to do is quote them verbatim, the jokes are supplied gratis. I think in their case getting the impersonation right is a lot harder than writing the material.
Baldwin is doing the right thing, but why the hell is NBC still running the Apprentice with Donald as the executive producer? They are sending a confusing message of resistance.
Marc, there is only one answer to that question – MONEY.
Marc @8,
I think this is a weird point. It’s like accusing Fox of sending a mixed message about cops, because the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine shows them as likeable doofuses and Lethal Weapon shows them as badass action heroes. There isn’t supposed to be a consistent message.
I don’t think NBC is trying to send a message of resistance at all. As iknklast notes, NBC is just a business trying to make money. No major broadcaster is going to declare itself the anti-Trump network. (Or the pro-Trump network, either. No, Fox is not an exception. Fox News is a cable news network; Fox the broadcast network has never hesitated to mock conservatives including Fox News.)
And while I don’t doubt that SNL’s writers and performers lean left, they’re mostly using Baldwin’s Trump impression because it’s good content. SNL is the same show that was happy to boost Trump’s profile by having him host in the past. The fact that Baldwin’s impression has a bit more bite to it than previous ones has more to do with meeting market demand than with any principled stand.
Second, “executive producer” is just a credit. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Some EPs are showrunners who are actually on-set managing every aspect of the show, others are just providing financial support, and still others are just folks who bargained for such a credit and may not be involved in any way. I suspect that Trump is this latter category: he helped create the show, and somewhere along the line he negotiated an EP credit for himself. NBC isn’t hiring Trump to work on The Apprentice. NBC made a deal with whatever production entity (presumably one of Mark Burnett’s companies) owns the rights to The Apprentice. That entity, in turn, presumably has a deal to give Trump EP credit. NBC doesn’t have the option of airing a new season of The Apprentice and NOT having Trump as executive producer, unless Trump agrees to such a deal.
But opposition to Trump-as-president isn’t solely or essentially or necessarily anything to do with leaning left. I once pointed out in a post that if he were a Democrat I would still loathe and oppose him, however much I preferred his policies. He’s a bad human being. He’s non-partisan bad. He’s bad for thinking he can and should and has a right to have the job of president. He’s bad for making no effort to do the work required to be a competent president. He’s bad for cheating, stealing, lying, pussygrabbing, bullying. He’s a BAD MAN.
Yeah, Trump’s election has pretty much refuted the notion that there is any kind of “character test” for the presidency. Oh, people will continue to cite “character issues” in future campaigns, as a way of bringing up anything unsavory or unpopular in the background of a candidate whose politics they don’t like, but at least on the Republican side, we’ve got proof that it just doesn’t matter to any significant number of people.