I want 5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible. It is far more powerful, faster, and smarter than the current standard. American companies must step up their efforts, or get left behind. There is no reason that we should be lagging behind on………

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 21, 2019

….something that is so obviously the future. I want the United States to win through competition, not by blocking out currently more advanced technologies. We must always be the leader in everything we do, especially when it comes to the very exciting world of technology!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 21, 2019

Great hearing in @senjudiciary today about the threats we face from Chinese dominance of the worldwide 5G network which presents economic and national security concerns.

Amazing bipartisanship on the issue. https://t.co/i2Tu79qATb

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) May 14, 2019

Huawei & ZTE pose a clear & alarming threat to our national security & the development of 5G, & should be banned. We now have to draw a line: foreign adversaries must be blocked from any involvement with our critical infrastructure & communications networks.

— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) May 16, 2019

Hey DC Twitter friends, I agree that Huawei is a major concern, but let’s talk less about them and more about what the U.S. can and should be doing to increase our own competitiveness in 5G, especially increasing support for research and development pic.twitter.com/26rgRrncqN

— Elsa B. Kania (@EBKania) May 16, 2019

No one in American politics understands the dark art of ridicule better than Donald Trump. (“Welcome to the race, Sleepy Joe.”) And when it comes to seeing himself on the receiving end, nobody in American politics has a thinner skin. His fury at President Barack Obama’s roasting of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner may have motivated his own run for the presidency. More recently, his sensitivity to ridicule has been on sharp display in his seething reaction to Alec Baldwin’s running impression over the past three years on “Saturday Night Live.”

Baldwin has carved out a late-career niche as the nation’s highest-profile interpreter of Trump. For most viewers, his performance, all preening and bluster, has settled into comedy-staple territory. And for most presidents, rolling with SNL’s punches is just another part of the job. Neither is true for this particular viewer-in-chief. The performance gets further under Trump’s skin with each passing season.

Story Continued Below

“Alec Baldwin portrayal stinks. Media rigging election!” he tweeted on October 16, 2016, three weeks before winning the election. By early 2018, safely ensconced in the White House, Trump was still taking it personally: “Alec Baldwin, whose dying mediocre career was saved by his terrible impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing me was agony. Alec, it was agony for those who were forced to watch.”

This year, Trump was back decrying the unfairness of it all, to the point of calling for an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission. “Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution.”

The SNL season wraps up on Saturday, with many fans wondering whether Baldwin will make an appearance. His sketches are by now guaranteed crowd-pleasers, expertly crafted portraits of the inner boob behind the blowhard. They’re eye and ear candy for the mostly liberal urban sophisticates at whom the show is aimed. But if those viewers think they’re watching an evisceration of Trump, they should look more closely at what the sketches are really saying about their nemesis. And while it’s certainly within the president’s rights to refuse to laugh along, he’s dead wrong in suggesting that Baldwin’s portrayal is politically damaging. In fact, it may be one of the best things he has going for him.

The sheer relentlessness of Trump’s disdain suggests that Baldwin’s impersonation must go beyond satire into something more subversive—that the 61-year-old actor is spewing poisonous propaganda against a duly elected leader. But to look back over the full Baldwin/Trump oeuvre since 2016 is to realize just how tame it is—and, in an important way, what a favor it does the president. Baldwin’s Trump bears a closer resemblance to the befuddled governor on the old “Benson” sitcom than it does “Dr. Strangelove” or “The Manchurian Candidate” or any other of the darker historical figures to whom he’s been compared. In Baldwin’s hands he’s foolish and self-deluded, all right, but he also sometimes seems abashed by the reactions he provokes and the trouble he accidentally stirs up. (“It’s awful. Everything’s falling apart. Sometimes I wish I had never been president,” he moans at the start of an “It’s a Wonderful Life” parody; “All alone again. No one understands me,” he sighs in a skit on his trip to South America.)

By giving Trump qualities he’s shown little evidence of in public—conscience, introspection, even regret— “SNL” does him an enormous favor. It offers a glimmer of sympathy about his motives, inviting the generous assumption that there’s a better and more self-aware man lurking behind the Twitter feed. In portraying the president as a beleaguered figure, it even allows the conclusion that the real threat to democracy isn’t Trump’s venomous rhetoric or disregard for constitutional norms, but the ruthlessness of the Washington system that confronts this blustering, fumbling uncle.

Now, as House Democrats debate the level of the president’s culpability for a series of actions that might reasonably appear to be attempts to obstruct justice, the “SNL” skits seem like grounds for exculpation. In the wake of the Mueller report, politicians, along with average Americans, are struggling to separate two competing notions of Trump—the fast-talking interloper who just got in over his head on some legal stuff, and Trump the deliberate lawbreaker. For instance, when the new president asked Chris Christie to tell then-FBI Director James Comey, who was overseeing the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, how much he liked him and considered him “part of the team,” did he know—as Christie, a former U.S. attorney, immediately did—that the request was inappropriate?

Baldwin’s characterization, as harshly as it may be intended by the actor and the writers who shape it, offers up an answer to that kind of question: No, of course, he had no idea. It’s a picture of the president as an uncomprehending naif. In the high-stakes argument about his fitness for the presidency, it amounts to an exhibit for the defense. Perhaps Trump should be thanking Baldwin, not threatening him.

The hidden influence of this kind of comedy, the widely seen late-night material that ends up as YouTube clips and watercooler fodder, lies in its ability to shape a narrative outside the news, interpreting people’s motives rather than just character. The comedian professes to peel off coats of varnish and reveal an essential but hidden truth. Often that truth is anodyne but amusing, and becomes an instant trope—a predictable laugh line, like Bill Clinton’s lustfulness. Baldwin’s vain but incompetent Trump is well within this tradition, with the audience chuckling along with his every ego-shattering overreach. But the long history of late-night comedy, especially the 44 years of “SNL,” shows that sometimes these comedy missiles really do land on the target. That’s the charge that Trump is leveling against Baldwin and “SNL.” He’s right about the power of late-night hit jobs. He’s just wrong in pitching himself as a victim.

***

Like many great satirical portrayals, Baldwin’s Trump is built around a single mannerism that isn’t so much copied from life as interpreted to express an inner truth. When this Trump messes up, his lips turn into a stupefied O. This gesture of surprise—the signature of Baldwin’s portrayal, which draws the biggest guffaws—usually comes when Baldwin/Trump does something impetuous (such as naming Kanye West his new strategist) or merely embarrassing (picking up a phone and finding Stormy Daniels on the line).

The narrative that emerges from three years of Baldwin’s Trump skits is that of an overeager salesman who gets swept up by a political wave he can’t control and washes ashore at the White House, the unintended victim of his own stunt. There he is, armed with nothing but his reserve tank of bluster and bravado, trying to brave his way through a job for which he is manifestly unprepared.

Like the subgenre of political movies in which average guys accidentally end up president, typified by “Dave,” the Trump sketches on “SNL” are essentially fish-out-of-water comedies. The humor comes from watching the imposter fake his way through the White House obstacle course. That may not be entirely flattering to Trump, but it is closer to his own view of his situation—which he once described as “surreal”—than to that of his most worried critics. For the jokes to work, the audience has to sympathize, at least a little, with his predicament.

For a franchise built on having an edge, especially when it comes to culture and politics, it might feel like “SNL” has gone soft. But despite its reputation for pushing boundaries, earned mostly in its early, pathbreaking days, “SNL” has only rarely been a source of political blasphemy. When it comes to public figures, it draws more giggles than gasps.

Over its four-plus decades, the show has cut down eight presidents (nine, if you count its early retrospective Nixon skits) and dozens of candidates, all without drawing much electoral blood. Its skits about Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were built around great comic turns by Darrell Hammond and Will Ferrell, but otherwise tracked closely to other late-night depictions of Clinton as louche and Bush as a dim-witted cowboy; “SNL” only added to the archetypes. That was better than it fared during the eight-year presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, who were their own archetypes. The show failed to produce consistently funny portraits, striking pure comedy gold only once in those years, in the late Phil Hartman’s memorable “Reagan Mastermind” sketch at the height of the Iran-Contra era. The joke then, unlike today, was that the president might actually be a master of self-control.

Dana Carvey’s memorably wacky, way-out-there take of George H.W. Bush remains a milestone of comic impersonation, though it’s arguable whether it had any political impact; the same with Dan Aykroyd’s know-it-all Jimmy Carter.

In retrospect, the show’s most politically lethal presidential portrait was its very first. When what was then known as “NBC’s Saturday Night” went on the air in October 1975, Gerald Ford had been in the White House a little more than a year, and America still wasn’t sure what it had gotten in its first unelected president. The amiable Ford arrived with a barrel full of goodwill from his decades as a popular House leader, but struggled to project himself on a broader stage. “Saturday Night” filled in the gaps. A former college football player (at the University of Michigan, no less), Ford was one of the country’s most athletic chief executives. Assuming the presidency at 61, he spent his vacations slaloming down the slopes of Vail rather than sipping wine on Martha’s Vineyard. But one of those ski trips included a rather mundane spill caught on camera, which combined with another slip when he carried his own umbrella down the rain-soaked steps of Air Force One to make a trend.

Enter Chevy Chase, the floppy-haired, insouciant writer and sketch comedian who became the show’s first star. He started interpolating falls in which the president tumbles within an inch of his life only to emerge with his chin high, his expression a Peter Sellers-like deadpan. Pretty soon, the show’s opening act every week was Ford falling down, and Chase began enacting other made-up gestures of presidential clumsiness, like hearing a phone ring and putting a full water glass to his ear. The message sank in: The unelected president was truly an accidental president.

Ford never quite survived that depiction; Chevy Chase’s falls cut him down to size, emphasizing his ordinariness. They became the physical expression of his illegitimacy and lack of charisma. When Ford lost the 1976 election by 2 percentage points, one could argue that “SNL”’s role in shaping his image had really hurt him.

Nonetheless, the good-natured Ford praised Chase and even appeared briefly on the show, thereby cementing his nice-guy reputation. In so doing, he started a trend in which the targets of “SNL” skits gritted their teeth and pretended to play along with the joke. George H.W. Bush invited Carvey to perform for his White House staff; in characteristic Bush fashion, a friendship ensued that lasted 25 years.

No doubt someone told the stories about Ford and George H.W. Bush to Sarah Palin, the subject of an epic impersonation by Tina Fey that was both as inspired as Carvey’s Bush and as devastating as Chase’s Ford. The real-life Alaskan governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate appeared on the show, looking like she’d rather be elsewhere, and offered a few uneasy one-liners, but the good-sport vibe didn’t carry over: Viewers kept laughing at her, not with her.

Palin’s flop didn’t deter the Hillary Clinton of 2016 from trying her own version of the Ford approach for dealing with “SNL,” appearing as a world-weary bartender while Kate McKinnon, playing Clinton, soaked up her advice. It was a funny moment, and the real Clinton looked reassuringly human standing behind a bar and calling herself Val. But like a dash of spritzer in a very dry wine, it barely reduced the acidity of McKinnon’s years of skits mocking Clinton as power-hungry and insincere. In interviews, McKinnon has expressed her admiration for Clinton, and no one doubts her sincerity. But McKinnon happens to be the most unsparing of caricature artists, a sketch-comedy assassin. Just ask Kellyanne Conway, Jeff Sessions, Lindsey Graham or many other targets of her image-shaping lacerations.

Trump may have been the one grumbling, but Clinton was on the losing end of 2016’s “SNL” primary. A transparently phony, cackling laugh; a finger wave that managed to be both withholding and condescending; an unquenchable thirst for power that provided the undercurrent for almost every skit: This was the Clinton-from-hell of voters’ nightmares, just plausible enough to settle over the campaign like an indictment. (If you aren’t convinced, just compare with the far more flattering, earnest Clinton portrayed by Amy Poehler during her 2008 run.) Yes, McKinnon’s Clinton was better-informed and far, far smarter than Trump—that was the rub, however. Where was her moral core? McKinnon provided an answer: ruthless ambition.

Like Chevy Chase and Tina Fey, Kate McKinnon is a writer as well as a performer, and her characterizations seem to come from somewhere outside her own persona: They’re like a few devastating paragraphs in a satirical novel. Alec Baldwin followed a different path to fame. He was a cinematic leading man who grew into a character actor. He learned in the proving ground of situation comedy how to show glimpses of humanity in otherwise objectionable figures—thus securing at least a winking share of the audience’s affection. That put Trump in the hands of a gentler satirist.

Despite his well-known aversion to the president—he has said it pains him to play Trump, and has described the president as a con man, a stooge of Russian President Vladimir Putin and worse—Baldwin unconsciously allows some of himself to spill over into his Trump. When Baldwin’s Trump listens to a barely coherent ramble from Kanye West in a sketch from late last year, he is in on the joke. “Oooh, this guy might be cuckoo,” he says to himself, in one of Baldwin’s verbal thought bubbles. He compares West to Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un (“and they made a lot more sense than him”) before musing, “He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t listen to anyone but himself. Who does he remind me of? Oh my God, he’s black me!”

***

If these types of self-aware interior monologues serve a humanizing function, warming up Trump’s image, why is he complaining? One reason is, of course, Trump’s renegade populism, which requires enemies. Trump has to appear as the victim of powerful elites in order to define himself by what he’s up against. His assault on Baldwin and “SNL” is of a piece with his similar rants against Jim Acosta and CNN.

There’s also vanity. Attacks on Trump’s competence and intelligence land on sore spots. For a candidate who scores his best numbers, by far, among the demographic that never attended college, he’s surprisingly quick to assert his Ivy League bona fides. He even ordered Michael Cohen to keep his educational transcripts under wraps, lest any bad grades from half a century ago find their way into the media.

These two possible explanations for Trump’s attacks on Baldwin frame the key question of his presidency, the one people are grappling with in post-Mueller Washington: Is Trump calculating, or is he improvising?

Trump-the-calculator presumably knew that his out-of-the-box praise for Putin during the 2016 campaign would increase his chances of a lucrative score with Trump Tower Moscow, using one of the sacred rituals of American democracy for his business advantage. Trump-the-improviser was just faking his way through, letting politics and business become intertwined mostly because he was acting on instinct and didn’t know the guardrails.

What appears to be authenticity is one of Trump’s greatest electoral calling cards, and Republicans tend to take it at face value. He’s an amateur in a professional game, and that explains why he sometimes breaks the rules. There’s a kind of everyman logic behind his actions, and his supporters want him to shake up the system. Despite their antipathy toward him, there are many Democrats who assess him on similar terms. In their eyes, Trump is woefully, agonizingly, even dangerously unqualified for the presidency, but he’s not fundamentally ill-intentioned, except perhaps in some of his prejudices. This may seem to them like a devastating judgment, which is embedded in Baldwin’s portrayal on “SNL.”

But there are, of course, much harsher assessments of Trump. One, suggested by the Mueller report, is of a man who willfully used the tools of his office for his personal benefit, who demanded illegal and unethical acts from his subordinates, threatened them and tried to replace them when they refused to go along and shredded legal and political norms in the process. In trying to save himself, that version of Trump isn’t some rogue elephant acting on instinct, but a narcissist who puts his own interests ahead of the country’s. There is, presumably, no twinkle in Trump’s eye when he orders his Treasury secretary to refuse a congressional subpoena of his tax records, no sharp intake of breath when he invokes executive privilege to shield an investigation into his own campaign. His mouth doesn’t twist into a petrified O when he maligns Robert Mueller or calls on Republican appointees of the Supreme Court to protect him.

This Trump isn’t the stuff of caricature, or the hapless figure of fun portrayed on “SNL.” He’s the one who shows up on TV nearly every day, president of the United States despite the disdain of all those knowing elites, bending Washington to his will.

I’ve loved this last season of GoT, including Dani going bugshit all over King’s Landing. There’s been a lot of negativity about the windup, but I think it’s just because people don’t want ANY ending. But you know what they say: All good things…

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) May 16, 2019