Actor Alec Baldwin — who frequently appears on Saturday Night Live to perform his mocking impersonation of Donald Trump and loathes the president so much that he actually wrote a book about it — asked Sunday if Trump slamming SNL for once again lambasting him constitutes a “threat” against Baldwin and his family.
“Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!” Trump tweeted early Sunday morning. “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!”
Though Trump is clearly just hammering his standard “Fake News Media” theme, Baldwin framed it as a potential personal threat — apparently based on the premise that Trump’s “followers” are supposedly prone to violence.
“I wonder if a sitting President exhorting his followers that my role in a TV comedy qualifies me as an enemy of the people constitutes a threat to my safety and that of my family?” Baldwin tweeted through his Hilaria and Alec Baldwin Foundation account.
Baldwin’s suggestion that Trump’s supporters are violent comes just a few months after Baldwin was charged with assault over an ugly parking place incident in which he reportedly admitted to police that he “did push” a man for supposedly taking his parking spot. “He’s an a**hole. He stole my spot. I did push him,” Baldwin allegedly said, the Daily Mail reported at the time. “I observed the defendant push me and then strike me across the left side of my face with his closed right hand, resulting in pain to my face,” the alleged victim said, according to court papers.
Baldwin then took to Twitter to complain about what he is faulting Trump for complaining about: unfair media coverage over the claim that he “punched” the man, which he denies.
“Normally, I would not comment on something as egregiously misstated as today’s story,” he said in a series of tweets. “However, the assertion that I punched anyone over a parking spot is false. I wanted to go on the record stating as much. I realize that it has become a sport to tag people w as many negative charges and defaming allegations as possible for the purposes of clickbait entertainment. Fortunately, no matter how reverberating the echos, it doesn’t make the statements true.”
Despite his popularity on the show, Baldwin’s pals at SNL hit him obliquely over the incident, dropping a line about “disgraced former actor Alec Baldwin, seen here molesting a young Boy Scout” the day after the arrest.
A few days after the embarrassing parking lot blow-up, Baldwin learned that his new interview show on ABC was getting a “demotion.”
“ABC’s patience with The Alec Baldwin Show has ended,” The Hollywood Reporter’s Lesley Goldberg reported in early November. “The network has pulled its remaining episodes of the pretaped talk show from its home on Sundays at 10 p.m., effective Nov. 18. Unaired new episodes of the series, hosted by Baldwin, will resume airing on in its new time slot on Saturdays, starting Dec. 8 at 10 p.m. Production on all the remaining episodes has already been completed.”
Baldwin, who once was among Trump’s circle of celebrity pals, has become one of the most vocal of his critics, consistently taking opportunities in public settings to condemn and mock Trump and even writing a satirical book about the president.