When Barack Obama Shaded Donald Trump Over His Snide Remark for Popular Sketch Show - SNL

Donald Trump served as the 45th President of the United States from 2017 to 2021. But the journey towards his presidency was mired with controversies, one such case was when Alec Baldwin misfired while trying to portray him on Saturday Night Live sketch show. Trump got offended and called out his 'poor representation' on the spoof show as - "Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!" Surprisingly, the then outgoing President Barack Obama came out in support of SNL while mocking Trump over his behavior. "This is a guy who, like, tweets, ‘They should cancel “Saturday Night Live.” I don’t like how Alec Baldwin’s imitating me.’ Really? I mean, that’s the thing that bothers you and you want to be President of the United States?”

The former Democratic President further voiced his opinion - “As Hillary points out, anybody that you can bait with a tweet is not someone you can trust with nuclear weapons,” Obama said, stumping for Hillary Clinton in Miami. “Anybody who is upset about a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit, you don’t want in charge of nuclear weapons.” 

Former Republican President had tweeted - "Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!"

According to The Things, Alec Baldwin created a political controversy when he made fun of Trump's plan to build a wall across the border to keep immigrants out. During the SNL skit, he mocked the blueprint saying - “We need a wall. We have a tremendous amount of drugs coming in through the southern border, or the ‘brown line’ as many people have asked me not to call it. You all see why I gotta fake this emergency, right? I have to because I want to. It’s really simple. We have a problem. Drugs are coming into this country through no wall. Wall works, wall makes safe. You don’t have to be smart to understand that – in fact it’s even easier to understand if you’re not that smart.”

However, things changed behind the scenes on SNL after Trump's historic win, the show's executive producer and writer of the variety sketch series, Lorne Michaels wanted more "Trump friendly" content on the show. Former cast member, Taran Killam confirmed it while on an exclusive interview with Deadline in 2018 saying - “Lorne was being so specific about what we could and couldn’t say about [Trump], and he was dictating a lot of the settings. Lorne was like, ‘It’ll be too old news by then, and you know, you don’t want to vilify him. He’s like any New York taxi driver. I know him, I’ve seen him around at parties for years and years, and he just says whatever it is he’s thinking. And that’s his thing. But you have to find a way in that makes him likable.”

Trump tweeted against the popular sketch show even though he had hosted one of its episodes with comedian Anthony Jeselnik, who later called it "revolting" - “It was two rich guys helping each other out. I don’t know how I would have dealt with it if I was on the show. I found it to be, quite frankly, revolting."