Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management by Sergei A. Samoilenko

Author:Sergei A. Samoilenko [Samoilenko, Sergei A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138556584
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Caricature in Chief

It only took three consecutive mimicries in the month of October 2016 for Trump to proclaim on Twitter that SNL is “boring and unfunny,” should be cancelled, and must be viewed as little more than a “hit job” on him. In the same tweet, Trump proclaimed that Baldwin’s caricature “stinks.” Trump’s problem seems to be that Baldwin consistently mocks him for his sheer idiocy and bigotry by amplifying to the absurd his own words and deeds. One might therefore quip that Trump does a great impression of Baldwin. As one reviewer put it, from the first, Baldwin’s performance was laced with “low-hanging Trumpisms,” like “the pathetic smallness of Trump’s cruelty, [and] the pithy meanness with which he attacks anyone who irritates him (be they babies, political opponents, or beauty queens)” (Crouch, 2016). In attacking Trump as a comic-grotesque iteration of him, Baldwin is able to be both the attacker and the subject of attack.

Much has been made of Trump’s cartoonish appearance. So, too, has much been made of Baldwin’s embodiment of the grotesqueries that can be gleaned from Trump’s carriage and countenance. In many ways, Baldwin is Trump – “the hair and make-up, the sneer, the bravado” (Czajkowski, 2017). This visual impression is not lost on SNL. In the first mock debate, Lester Holt – played by Michael Che – introduces Trump as “the man to blame for the bottom half of all his kids’ faces.” Toward the end of the same sketch, Baldwin-as-Trump describes then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as “the one with the bad temperament,” almost as if he is constructing an I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I line of reasoning. “She’s always screaming,” he shouts. “She’s constantly lying. Her hair is crazy. Her face is completely orange, except around the eyes where it’s white. And when she stops talking her mouth looks like a tiny little butthole.” Later, when Baldwin appears as the Tweeter-in-Chief during an intelligence briefing, he asks senior counselor, Kellyanne Conway (played by Kate McKinnon), whether or not an object on a table off-screen is a picture that the media often uses, which he doesn’t like. “No,” Conway replies as she pulls the object into view. “That’s just a plate of mashed potatoes, sir.” Later still, in painting a picture of North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Baldwin revisits his style of disparaging Clinton. “Kim Jong Un is a bad, bad guy,” he says in the Oval Office. “He’s a warmonger. He’s quick to anger. He’s a yuge narcissist. He’s got a stupid little haircut. I mean, why would they let a man like that run an entire country?” Looks, in each of these examples, add rhetorical force to Baldwin’s caricature of Trump’s public statements and the content of his character.

Importantly, Baldwin ties Trump’s appearance to his rhetorical style, emphasizing words like yuge (“huge”) and Ji-Na (“China”), and then again making fun of his scattershot logic. In a sendup of Trump’s first press conference as president, Baldwin addresses a controversy involving uncorroborated claims that Russian intelligence caught him engaged in “golden showers” at the Ritz Carlton while on a business trip in Moscow.

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