NBC’s most recent edition of Saturday Night Live crossed the line from satire into straight-up fake news as James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump character confessed to being a sociopath after the recent incident in the Oval Office where a man fainted. Additionally, Johnson claimed to be pleased that the Supreme Court allowed him to “stop feeding poor people.”
After Jeremy Culhane played the part of the fainting man, Johnson appeared and looked totally uninterested in what had just happened, “Oh, hi. Didn't see you there. Someone was dying in my office. I think I'm playing this very normal. Just stand there and stare like a sociopath. Didn’t even pretend like I was going to help, someone drops something and you do the fake bend, you know, ‘oh, let me help you pick that up, oh, you got it? You got it?’"
The skit is worse when you consider that SNL’s cold opens have a way of convincing people that history did not occur as it actually did. For example, back in 2008, 87 percent of Obama voters believed that Sarah Palin actually said she could see Russia from her house when it was actually SNL’s Tina Fey, impersonating Palin, who said that. The truth is Trump initially did look concerned, but backed away from the crowd surrounding the man because he almost certainly felt that he would be of no help because he is not a doctor and instead chose to just get out of the way.
[See NewsBusters for more]
