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Alec Baldwin Could Fill In For Trump At White House Correspondents’ Dinner

By Nathan Francis
Published on: 13:48 PST, Feb 25, 2017

Alec Baldwin has made a killing recently with his spot-on impression of Donald Trump, and now the Saturday Night Live regular could be taking the impersonation to a bigger stage: the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

On Saturday evening, the president made the surprise announcement that he would not be attending the annual event put on by the White House Correspondents’ Association, which is an opportunity for comedians to poke fun at the president. Trump did not give a reason for turning down the dinner — the first president not to attend since Ronald Reagan in 1981, when he was recovering from an assassination attempt — but many commenters believed the president’s notoriously thin-skinned nature had him afraid of facing down live criticism.

But some fans have a great idea, having Alec Baldwin fill in as Trump instead. Within minutes of the president’s announcement, many people flooded to Twitter calling on Baldwin to take his place.

Actor and director Zach Braff was one of the first to raise the idea.

Many others joined in, calling on Alec Baldwin to take his biting impression to the dinner in Trump’s place.

Even CNN host Brian Stelter said he was getting requests to push Alec Baldwin into the role.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is often a no-holds-barred event, when comedians get a chance to poke fun at presidents right to their face. One of the most famous was Stephen Colbert’s biting criticism of George W. Bush at the 2006 dinner, when the future late night host took aim at Bush’s tendency to bend the truth.

And even before he became president, Donald Trump has been a target at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In 2011, shortly after the peak of the Trump-led birther movement that ultimately led Barack Obama to release his full birth certificate, Obama railed into the real estate mogul for his leading the charge on the conspiracy theory that Obama had been born in Kenya.

That would likely be the same idea if Alec Baldwin were to fill in for the president at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Baldwin’s impression has been particularly biting, with his Saturday Night Live appearances attacking Trump for his allegations of sexual assault, his potential scandal with Russia, and his general difficulty in forming coherent answers to the press.

It’s not clear if the event’s organizers are seriously considering Baldwin to fill in for the president. Doing so would likely be a shot across the bow for Trump, who has declared something of a war on the press. The president has repeatedly referred to news outlets that he does not like as “fake news” and this week said that some outlets are actually the enemy of the American people, Politico noted

“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” he tweeted.

The dig didn’t go over too well with members of the press, who hit back at Trump.

So far, Alec Baldwin has not responded to the requests that he fill in for Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

[Featured Image by John Moore/Getty Images]

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