Alec Baldwin may not be playing the president for much longer. The actor revealed to Extra’s Mario Lopez while doing press for The Boss Baby that Donald Trump’s behavior upon entering office has been worse than he ever could have imagined and that his scathing take on the leader of the free world on Saturday Night Live is starting to weigh on him.
“[Trump’s] policies aside, which you can hate, I thought he would have just relaxed,” Baldwin explained. “The maliciousness of this White House has people worried … that’s why I’m not going to do it much longer, the impersonation. I don’t know how much more people can take it.”
Upon taking over for Darrell Hammond, Baldwin revealed an impersonation that proved to be uniquely irksome for then–presidential candidate Trump. The Republican nominee began hate-tweeting SNL on a near-weekly basis, openly expressing his displeasure with Baldwin’s performance. Over the past month, however, attention has veered away from SNL’s Trump and toward the takes on those in the president’s C Cabinet and administration, including Kate McKinnon’s Jeff Sessions and Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer.
Baldwin’s getting at a larger problem about satirizing Trump. For those who oppose the president—for the majority of the country, that is—the news coming out of the White House can feel ceaselessly, ever-increasingly bleak. Baldwin’s impersonation depicts the man as at once buffoonish, dishonest, and incomparably self-obsessed—not exactly stranger than fiction, in other words. And with that logic, it could make sense for him to give up the toupée after a distinguished run.
Of course, he’s not finished yet. Might a surprise Correspondents Dinner appearance serve as his grand finale?
