Alec Baldwin defends playing Trump on SNL coronavirus hospitalization: We wouldn't have mocked him if he was "truly, gravely ill"

Entertainment Weekly

In a lengthy Instagram video Sunday, Baldwin said that Saturday Night Live wouldn't have poked fun at Trump's diagnosis if the show thought he was "truly, gravely ill." "If there was ever the suggestion that Trump was truly, gravely ill, and people said, 'Trump is really in trouble,' then I would bet you everything I have that we wouldn't even get near that, in terms of content of the show," Baldwin said, according to EW. "They would have done something else. I've seen that happen before...We only have the words of the White House itself and the people who work there themselves to go on, and all of them have all been saying he isn’t in any danger. We only have their word to go by. And if their word was that he was in serious trouble, then we probably wouldn't have done it." Baldwin also defended SNL opening with a debate sketch, even though the Biden-Trump debate was old news by Saturday night. "We thought the debate was something topical, and we didn't have anything with him in a hospital bed, but we had the debate," Baldwin added. "You'd have to have a very good reason to avoid that, topicality-wise, and nobody thought that they were mocking somebody's illness by doing that."

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