Alec Baldwin once acknowledged that lampooning Donald Trump on “Saturday Night Live,” during the four years of his turbulent presidency, was probably the “biggest job” of his career.
But that Emmy-winning gig ended when Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020, which the outspoken Democratic actor celebrated, as Vanity Fair reported. “I don’t believe I’ve ever been this overjoyed to lose a job before!” Baldwin said in a tweet.
More than two years later, you would expect Baldwin to loudly celebrate the prospect of his public nemesis being booked and arraigned in a New York courtroom Tuesday – making history as the first former president to face criminal charges.
Thus far, however, Baldwin has been silent on Trump’s indictment – perhaps because his fortunes have taken a steep downturn since he stopped playing Trump on “SNL.” Maybe Baldwin has realized he’s not in a position to crow about Trump being charged with a crime because he, too, has become a criminal defendant on charges stemming from a significantly more tragic event.
The 65-year-old former star of “30 Rock” was charged in early February with involuntary manslaughter in the 2021 shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of his Western film, “Rust.”
For the time being, the attention-loving Trump doesn’t seem to be hanging his head in shame, even if he’s an-ex president indicted in connection with paying hush money to a porn star, and he faces a raft of other state and federal investigations. Instead, the one-time reality TV star is “milking this moment for all its worth,” the New York Times said, portraying himself as the victim of a political “witch hunt” and raking in millions for his 2024 re-election campaign.
This past weekend, “Saturday Night Live” seized on Trump’s opportunism for its cold open. As has been the case since Baldwin stepped away from the “SNL” job, cast member James Austin Johnson played Trump and pushed a new money grab on his supporters: An album of the fictional 45th president singing different cover songs on a record titled “Now That’s What I Call My Legal Defense Fund,” a.k.a. ”Trump Bopz.”
“Some are saying I’m going to use this indictment to rile up my base so that they give me more money,” Johnson’s Trump explained. “Not true. Not true. I don’t want anything from my base except their love, their votes, perhaps their money, and I need their money more than ever.”
Even though Baldwin has long been out of the picture for “SNL’s” Trump sendups, his absence was felt in the 72 hours before Trump’s return to New York hometown on Monday where he was expected to be booked on multiple charges of falsifying business records.
The fact that Baldwin wasn’t there to do “SNL’s” latest cold open was a reminder of how things have changed, both for America and for these two famously belligerent, larger-than-life New Yorkers whose animus towards each other is well known.
Starting in 2016, both men enjoyed several years as kings of their respective new domains. Trump won the presidential election and became leader of the free world, while Baldwin began mimicking him on a regular basis and secured a central position in American pop culture.
Indeed, Baldwin, a former movie heartthrob-turned-character actor, became a hero of the resistance by portraying Trump as narcissistic, braying, befuddled and dangerous. The critical acclaim for Baldwin’s 2017 memoir, “Nevertheless,” also momentarily wiped out memories of the hot-tempered actor’s past controversies: his street fights with paparazzi, his 2007 voicemail for his 11-year-old daughter calling her a “thoughtless little pig.”
It also became apparent that Baldwin got under Trump’s skin, which delighted the president’s critics and made the actor even more beloved, Vanity Fair reported.
“Alec Baldwin, whose dying mediocre career was saved by his terrible impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing me was agony,” Trump wrote on Twitter in 2018, shortly after Baldwin gave an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in which he expressed displeasure with having to play the president. “Alec, it was agony for those who were forced to watch. Bring back Darrell Hammond, funnier and a far greater talent!”
All four years of Trump’s presidency were marked by scandal after scandal, controversy after controversy – his never-ending “psychodrama,” as Vanity Fair writers Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan recently said. When Trump lost the election, Baldwin was looked to as one of the lead voices on the left celebrating his defeat.
Baldwin returned to poke fun at Trump, following news on Nov. 7, 2020 that Biden had been declared the winner. Wearing his light-orange Trumpian wig, Baldwin sat alone at the piano to perform a sad cover of The Village People’s “Macho Man.” Just as the Trump era seemed to come to an end, the era of Baldwin-as-Trump also was coming to an end.
But almost immediately, life began to take weird and even darker, disturbing turns for both men. In the waning days of 2020 and into early 2021, Trump tried to hang onto power by fomenting false claims of election fraud, culminating with his MAGA supporters launching a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. To Trump’s critics, the defeated president seemed to embody his disgrace and “sore loser” status by flying off to Mar-a-Lago and refusing to participate in Biden’s inauguration.
Things started to go sideways for Baldwin too. He became embroiled in the considerably less earth-shattering but still bizarre scandal involving his 26-years-younger influencer wife, Hilaria. People on social media began to find multiple examples of Boston-born Hilaria faking a Spanish accent in interviews and giving her fans the impression she was a glamorous European immigrant. While Hilaria Baldwin essentially refused to take responsibility for misleading fans, people began to find instances of Baldwin going along with her Spanish immigrant story.
At the same time, Baldwin faced a post- “SNL” career that no longer involved A-list movie or TV projects. Despite that, Baldwin kept busy – maybe because he has seven young children to raise – by lining up roles and producing credits in low-budget movies, which led to the low-budget “Rust,” which was filming in New Mexico in October 2021. A number of film industry experts have speculated that cost-cutting measures on the set led to lax safety standards and a situation in which Baldwin was handed a revolver with a live round to rehearse a gunfight scene. When the gun in Baldwin’s hand fired, Hutchins was killed.
Over the past year, the ever-outspoken Baldwin has been almost Trumpian in his defiance of public relations experts’ advice by going on TV and social media to proclaim his innocence and declare himself the victim of an unfair prosecution. Baldwin also has insisted that he believed the gun was safe to use and raised eyebrows by deny pulling the trigger. As a producer for “Rust,” Baldwin has also had to fight off multiple lawsuits related to Hutchins’ death. In February, the New Mexico District Attorney’s Office filed involuntary manslaughter charges.
Shortly after Hutchins’ death, Trump wasted no time in having his say on Baldwin’s misfortune. During a podcast interview with conservative radio host Chris Stigall, Trump proclaimed that his nemesis is “a troubled guy. There’s something wrong with him,” Insider reported.
But Trump didn’t stop there, echoing the view that the actor bears some responsibility for Hutchins’ death. Trump even suggested that Baldwin shot her deliberately.
“He’s a cuckoo-bird. He’s a nutjob,” Trump said. “And usually, when there’s somebody like that, you know, in my opinion, he had something to do with it.” If nothing else, Trump said, Baldwin should not have pointed a gun at a crew member, whether loaded or not.
Trump also used the interview as an opportunity to take yet another dig at Baldwin’s impersonation of him, Insider reported. “There’s something wrong with him,” Trump repeated. “I thought he did a poor job of imitating me.”
In that situation, at least, Baldwin ended up having the last word. In one of his questionable interviews about Hutchins’ death, Baldwin told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos: “I thought to myself, just when you think that things can’t get more surreal, here’s the former president of the United States making a comment on this tragic situation.”
