TV

This Clip Of Donald Trump Dancing To ‘Hotline Bling’ Is All You Need To Know About His Return To SNL

Ugggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh. It was not good.

by Meg Watson  9 November 2015

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Since being announced last month, Donald Trump’s hosting gig on SNL has been met with much scrutiny. The show’s been accused of giving him more attention or validation than he deserves; running the risk of humanising a notoriously absurd character who’s already implausibly leading the polls in the race for the Republican Presidential nomination. This, combined with what many see in a slow decline in quality, has led some critics to accuse SNL of being politically irrelevant — a toothless, ratings-driven version of its former self.

Saving me the hassle of running through all these points in detail — giving you the for-and-against and critiquing the insidious political capital gained from each silly joke — here’s a clip of Donald “Mexicans are rapists” Trump dancing to Drake’s ‘Hotline Bling’ alongside Martin Short dressed as Ed Grimley. It kind of speaks for itself.

This is fairly indicative of the rest of last night’s episode — one which is being near exclusively panned by critics. In a rare one-star review, Joe Berkowitz of Vulture called Donald Trump “a black hole of comedic antimatter” even suggesting the SNL writers may have bowed out in protest of Trump’s involvement. Dennis Perkins from The AV Club called it “bad satire, bad comedy [and] bad TV” and Willa Paskin from Slate dove deep into the show’s inadequacies deeming the satire “indistinguishable from a campaign ad”.

“It’s hard to make fun of the person on stage with you, but SNL has successfully dinged political candidates — Sarah Palin — to their face before,” she wrote. “Hillary Clinton’s recent appearance with Kate McKinnon, while ultimately positive for Clinton, was pointed. McKinnon, with her rictus grin, and her fixation on Clinton’s inability to relax or jibe with regular people, gets at an aspect of Clinton’s persona that is actually a problem for her … Larry David played Bernie Sanders as an unfriendly kook with a problem with black voters. Meanwhile, Trump was getting teased for imagining he can save the world. With insults like that, he has no need for compliments.”

Criticisms like this were most pointedly aimed at a sketch which showed Trump two years into his Presidential term. Here he had built a wall on the Mexican border, intimidated foreign leaders, and won the overwhelming support of the American people.

However the rest of the episode was similarly unremarkable. In the opening monologue, Trump pulled more of his familiar egotistical schtick before jokingly being called out as racist by Larry David.

And in another sketch, he live-tweeted mean things about the SNL cast members playing up the angry old Grandpa persona we regularly see online.

All this earned the show its highest overnight ratings since 2012, but it also drew a number of protesters outside the studios. During the episode’s filming around 200 Latino activists expressed their disappointment that such a major network would give Trump’s routinely racist views a platform in the first place.

The latter may be something to keep in mind while on the internet today.

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