Alec Baldwin defends playing Trump on SNL: ‘If he was truly, gravely ill we wouldn’t have done it’

Some viewers thought the mockery of the president was in poor taste

Alec Baldwin has defended his mockery of Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live, after some condemned the programme for joking about the president so soon after his coronavirus diagnosis.

The season 46 premiere of SNL, which aired on Saturday 3 October, saw Baldwin reprise his role as the politician. Producers took the decision not to do a skit about Trump being diagnosed with and subsequently hospitalised for coronavirus, and instead parodied his recent messy debate against Joe Biden (played by Jim Carrey).

The sequence has already garnered over nine million views on YouTube, and it does briefly touch on Trump contracting Covid-19, with Baldwin quipping: “The China Virus has been very mean to me by being a hoax, and that statement will not come back to haunt me later this week.”

While some viewers enjoyed the sketch, others argued it was in poor taste due to the president's ill-health.

In a lengthy Instagram video, Baldwin explained: “If there was ever the suggestion that Trump was truly, gravely ill, and people said, 'Trump is really in trouble,' then I would bet you everything I have that we wouldn't even get near that, in terms of content of the show. They would have done something else. I've seen that happen before.”

Before SNL aired, Trump had released a video declaring that he was “starting to feel good” and that he thinks he will “be back soon”.

"We only have the words of the White House itself and the people who work there themselves to go on, and all of them have all been saying he isn’t in any danger,” added Baldwin. “We only have their word to go by. And if their word was that he was in serious trouble, then we probably wouldn't have done it.

“We thought the debate was something topical, and we didn't have anything with him in a hospital bed, but we had the debate. You'd have to have a very good reason to avoid that, topicality-wise, and nobody thought that they were mocking somebody's illness by doing that.”

There have been conflicting reports about the president’s health, with his administration seemingly unable to give a clear message about his true state. Trump’s physician Sean Conley said over the weekend that he was “extremely happy” with Trump’s progress, while White House chief of staff Mark Meadows stated something quite different: “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We are still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”

Baldwin has been impersonating Trump since the 2016 elections, winning an Emmy for his portrayal of the president in 2017.

His impression of the politician is so effective that, in 2017, a newspaper mistakenly used a picture of Baldwin's version of Trump in place of the man himself.