President Trump says the justice system should stop investigating his administration and go after the real enemy – “Saturday Night Live.”
During a series of Sunday morning tweets attacking everyone from his former attorney Michael Cohen to Hillary Clinton, the President slipped in the suggestion that NBC’s long-running comedy skit program should be “tested in courts,” seemingly for its alleged “collusion” with Democratic party interests.
“A REAL scandal is the one sided coverage, hour by hour, of networks like NBC & Democrat spin machines like Saturday Night Live. It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials. Should be tested in courts, can’t be legal? Only defame & belittle! Collusion?” the President tweeted.
Trump has repeatedly slammed investigations into his campaign’s possible involvement in electoral misconduct as “a witch hunt.” He’s insisted the process should be brought to an end.
Hours before Trump’s morning tweet storm, “Saturday Night Live” opened with a segment inspired by the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” in which the cast wonders what the world might have be like had Trump not been elected president.
“It’s awful, everything is falling apart, sometimes I wish I’d never been president,” Trump says at the beginning of the skit. Then an angel magically transports the President to an alternate reality holiday party, where everyone around him is happier because Clinton won the election by making one visit to Wisconsin.
In the skit, Alec Baldwin reprised his role as Trump and was joined onstage by Matt Damon, playing Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who never made it to the highest court in the land. The skit also featured Robert De Niro as special counsel Robert Mueller.
It’s unlikely that a U.S. court would hear the President’s case against “Saturday Night Live” as parody has historically been protected by the First Amendment.
A prime example of courts protecting the media’s right to parody a celebrity came in 1988 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of pornographer Larry Flynt after Rev. Jerry Falwell sued over a satirical interview in Hustler magazine that joked that Falwell’s first sexual encounter was with his own mother.
A Virginia jury ordered Flynt to pay $150,000 in damages. Flynt appealed, and won his case in the Supreme Court on an 8-0 vote. “Despite their sometimes caustic nature, from the early cartoon portraying George Washington as an ass down to the present day, graphic depictions and satirical cartoons have played a prominent role in public and political debate,” chief justice William Rehnquist observed in his majority decision in the case.
The case was featured in a 1996 movie, “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” that starred Woody Harrelson, Ed Norton and Courtney Love.
There’s precedent for “Saturday Night Live” putting its own spin on “It’s a Wonderful Life.” In 1986, Dana Carvey starred in a parody where the townspeople of Bedford Falls form a mob to attack Mr. Potter, the movie’s wheelchair-bound scoundrel.
“Why, you’re nothing but a fraud!” exclaims Carvey, playing the movie’s hero George Bailey, when he discovers during the beating that Mr. Potter isn’t actually handicapped.
