Still, it’s worth noting we’ve seen this kind of thing before. Jim Downey, a longtime political comedy specialist at SNL, famously said in 2014 that President Obama was impregnable too. “It’s like being a rock climber looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Downey said. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto—certainly not a flaw or hook that you can caricature.”
Maya Rudolph of SNL, tasked with playing Vice President Kamala Harris, said in October that it was her “civic duty” to get the Biden-Harris ticket elected: “I gotta get there and do whatever I need to do to make sure that she wins this election, and also that I do a good job.” More recently, after winning an Emmy for her portrayal, Rudolph said of Harris, “I just wanna do her proud.” Not exactly a Menckenesque sentiment.
Journalism and comedy aren’t the same thing, but they do overlap. Both require skepticism about the way things are, about people in power, about the binding power of conventional wisdom. One reason people voted for Trump in the first place was the perception that our self-appointed cultural superiors had such an obvious double standard when it came to who deserved mockery—and who didn’t. You’d think the people most tormented by Trump’s presidency would have learned some lessons from that.
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