Shy of a Load
The Nov. 8 Saturday Night Live, hosted by magnate Donald Trump, was more significant than hilarious, although it was lots funnier than most weekend pundits claim.
A scan of website headlines shows mine is a minority view. I have not read their texts yet to prevent their influencing mine.
The first review for me to read will be that of my friend Gene Seymour at CNN.com, “Trump on SNL: The Ultimate Implosion of Reality.” Gene’s certainly will be a full write-up and thoughtful. Below contains impulsive impressions.
There’s making fun of yourself, self-deprecation (not necessarily funny) and destroying-then-reconstructing your image. Trump may well have deliberately gone for the last. When political candidates have appeared on SNL, as recently as October when Hillary Rodham Clinton played a phantom bartender, it’s for a single skit or a walk-on with line. Politicians thus can be seen by the youthful audience, appear hip and control the message. Clinton used it to claim she was self-aware, relaxed, competent and a few shades warmer than her cool reputation.
As host, Trump appeared in most of the sketches in the 90-minute program. It’s live: The room for misspeaking and other errors is huge — HUGE — especially for amateurs. He’s been on camera for thousands of hours but not as a professional comic performer.
This is at a time when Republican candidates including Trump are reconfiguring debates to increase their control.
Why did Trump take this risk? My take is that he doesn’t want to be president, unless we just hand it to him. What Trump proved Saturday that he really wants is to improve the candidate selection process by warning the American people to watch what they ask for, they might get the likes of him.
The final skit confirmed it. (Its video is essentially “safe for work” but inappropriate for those older children who get double-entendres. Toddlers won’t understand and teens will giggle.)
The recurring Vanessa Bayer – Cecily Strong sketch “Porn Stars” comprises a series of malapropisms as the addled performers misread the cue cards / TelePrompTer for a variety of infomercials. This one is purportedly a Trump campaign ad. They call him “Donald Tramp.” Bobby Moynihan pops in with a large red, not blonde, wig to impersonate Tramp. The real deal appears at the end to disavow the ad — “I did not endorse this. …”
Name another politician who could appear in something like this while seeking office or already serving.
Another dicey skit is a take-off of a video by Canadian rap star Drake, “Hotline Bling Parody,” where cast members do silly dances in a large box with colored lights. Trump takes a turn hopping around, as does former cast member Martin Short as the nerd Ed Grimley.
Donald Trump is a social but not religious conservative. He continues to be first or second in most polls, apparently because of his bluntness about the current president, immigration worries, black Americans, social programs, and with foreign policy he leaps from intervention to isolationism willy nilly. These appeal to those who are unlikely to watch SNL, the Know-Nothing / Isolationist sort. In fact, Saturday’s program included just the type, Moynihan’s “Drunk Uncle” character.
This (Political Action Committee) PAC-funded primary process is failing when a rich guy who breathes near-parody moves over into full parody — and still continue to lead. Until he doesn’t, probably after the first primaries in early 2016.
Yeah, I like most of what Trump did on the show. It wasn’t top SNL, but it had moments of spot-on absurdity and satire. If self-deprecatory humor is not quite accurate, then call his effort a literal testing of post-modern slash deconstruction slash meta approach. Trump just might be aiming for a transparent, perhaps cynical, view that lets voters see behind the curtain of hypocrisy.
This just could strengthen both parties and streamline the presidential candidate selection process. Maybe that’s been Trump’s plan all along.
• • •
This past week Trump’s top rival, Dr. Ben Carson, has been found to have been padding his resume. No more than other candidates, but it’s the neurosurgeon’s first exposure of overreaching. He has claimed to have been a tough kid, offered a scholarship to West Point — both summarized in “Carson Defends West Point Story, Calls News Media ‘Unfair’” from the Associated Press — and aced a psychology class experiment at Yale, broken by The Wall Street Journal.
The AP story notes, “Students who are granted admission to West Point are not awarded scholarships. Instead, they are said to earn appointments to the military academy, which come with tuition, room and board and expenses paid, in exchange for five years of service in the Army after graduation.”
A friend from Little Rock newspaper days noted on Facebook that Hillary Clinton has exaggerated aspects of her record as well. Another ex-newsroom colleague wrote, “You know that Hillary has been vetted inside and out compared to Carson! Welcome to the would-be president world!”
I wrote in to agree with both.
It happens because story matters to the electorate. The turning from a life of violence, the opportunity to go to not just an Ivy League school but to be sought by the U.S. Military Academy, to outsmart peers, is packaged for them.
Meanwhile, there are examples showing possible presidential mettle, like when Hillary Clinton ducked a thrown object in April 2014 during a speech in Las Vegas.
Reuters’ account identifies the assailant.
HRC is tough to like. Trust is nearly out of the question. Though we claim niceness and honesty are necessary for leaders — I grew tired of my friend the editorialist Paul Greenberg carping on Bill Clinton’s lack of candor — those need to be low on the scale of attributes for president.
Voters want and need to know the background of who they choose to run the country. Voters need more that a president is wily when needed, which is often.
• • •
It’s sad that there’s only a couple of Republicans who could run the country — my pre-election-year opinion is “into the ground” but my conservative relatives and friends say they’d do fine — John Kasich and Marco Rubio. It’s a shame Paul Ryan, the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate, isn’t returning to the national stage. He had to be talked into running House speaker in recent weeks. Ryan’s smart, and he negotiates tough while willing in the end to compromise for the greater good.
Trump’s mocking of the overlong primary process could help the Republicans in 2020 gather a field of competent candidates. It also will help the other (left or blue) side of the aisle.
It’s sad that the Democratic choice is just Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders is running as a symbol. Biden and Al Gore may be in the end too old to be comfortable as candidates. Where are the younger Dems? Clinton has been a fait accompli for four years, even eight years, so no names come up from the middle to left. We will see one, though, when she picks a running mate. It could be a fellow from Texas, according to “The Campaign to Put Julian Castro on Hillary’s VP Shortlist” from Politico.
The Democrats this year should have had at least one strong rival to Madame Clinton. Republicans vetting well over a dozen is no better and ending up with a politically inexperienced twosome is no better.
We should howl at Trump’s star turn — if we believe “meta is betta,” if we dare laugh at ourselves.
