“Saturday Night Live” (“SNL”) has spent 50 years making politicians look like bumbling fools. Since 1975, the show has used humor to help viewers interpret the world around them. Dana Carvey’s impression of President George H.W. Bush was so ubiquitous that Bush himself quoted it at the 1992 White House Correspondents Dinner. Will Ferrell played George W. Bush for the entirety of his presidency, turning his verbal stumbles into recurring national punchlines. Darrell Hammond’s larger-than-life portrayal of President Bill Clinton became a defining character in the 1990s. These were more than just funny sketches; they gave the emerging cast members a platform, an audience and a career.
That stopped about ten years ago. And the man responsible is the same man the show should be most energized to satirize.
Donald Trump’s relationship with “SNL” is one of the strangest contradictions in recent comedy history. In November 2015, while he was running for president and dominating the news cycle, NBC invited Trump to host the show. The decision was controversial. Protesters gathered outside 30 Rock, NBC’s iconic studio, and cast members reported discomfort, but the network proceeded anyway. At the time, a lot of people still treated Trump as a spectacle rather than a serious candidate, and “SNL’s” decision reflected that. The show that had spent decades cutting politicians down to size gave one of them a full hour of airtime and a musical number.
Then Trump won the presidency, and “SNL” had to figure out what to do with him.
The show’s answer was 3-time Golden Globe Winner Alec Baldwin. Rather than handing the Trump impression to a cast member, the way every major political role had worked, producers brought in an outside celebrity to play the president. The logic made sense in the moment. Baldwin’s impression was sharp and got immediate attention. But it set a detrimental precedent that hurt the show for years. The most important role on “SNL” belonged to a guest, not a young actor in the cast who could grow and build a career around it.
The same thing happened in 2020. Comedy icon Jim Carrey was brought in to play Joe Biden. Maya Rudolph, a former cast member with a successful career beyond the show, returned to play Kamala Harris. Both were recognizable and garnered attention, but neither needed the show to build their career.
The importance of these decisions is clear when looking at “SNL” in the decade before Trump. The late 2000s and early 2010s cast produced Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Amy Poehler, Andy Samberg, Seth Myers, Kristen Wiig, Jason Sudeikis and Maya Rudolph — nearly all of whom went on to have major film and television careers. Political impressions were a huge part of this development. Week after week, cast members turned impressions into cultural icons. Armisen played Barack Obama for years, Wiig played Michele Bachmann and Bill Hadar played James Carville. All recurring roles that pushed performers to make creative choices and improve.
The Trump era didn’t produce anything like that. Ask most people to name who plays Trump on “SNL” right now, and they’ll likely draw a blank.
“SNL” is currently working with a cast of new faces, and, as has been the case with every other cast in the show’s history, there are genuinely talented people in it. But these performers haven’t been given the opportunity that earlier generations had. When a big political moment arrives, the show’s instinct is to reach for someone familiar. For example, a recent cold open about immigration enforcement, one of the sharper political sketches of the current season, brought back Pete Davidson as border czar Tom Homan rather than establishing someone new. The sketch landed, but it exemplifies “SNL’s” reliance on familiar faces and resistance to building up new performers.
Trump’s second term has been more disruptive and extreme than his first. There is no shortage of material. The cabinet of individuals like Robert F. Kennedy, J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth offers the kind of rogues gallery that “SNL” once would have turned into cultural cornerstones. Instead, the impressions are scattered and unmemorable.
For decades, the show’s greatest political contributions came from upstart performers who were handed a character and the time to make it their own. “SNL” has a new cast and more material than it knows what to do with; it just has to decide to use them.
