Alec Baldwin Wonders if His Bad Trump Parody Isn't the Revolutionary Satire He Thought It Was

When it comes to standing up to Donald Trump, it’s unlikely that many people turn to the long-defanged comedy stylings of Saturday Night Live as the leader of the hashtag resistance.

Nevertheless, Alec Baldwin can’t help but wonder if he, personally, might be partially responsible for making Trump’s awfulness even worse.

Why would he think that when he’s sticking it to Trump with “gems” like this?

“In terms of Trump, do you think we’re making him kind of a little too cuddly and a little too funny and we’re taking people’s mind off something really more serious?” Baldwin mused to guest Bernie Sanders (for real) during this week’s episode of his podcast Here’s The Thing.

“I think what we have to focus on Trump is what he is doing,” Sanders replied gnomically.

Setting aside the issue of Alec Baldwin asking Bernie Sanders to weigh in on the important topic of Alec Baldwin, the question is in some ways a fair one. SNL has a long history of helping distill and showcase existing public sentiment about politicians—think Dan Aykroyd’s Jimmy Carter, Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin, or Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush.

But Baldwin is clearly giving himself too much credit here. No one is looking to him to mount a barricade and start in on “Do You Hear The People Sing.” And certainly nobody thinks that his spending one night a week glowering to camera and reading milquetoast punchlines is somehow diluting what it means to #resist—because nobody ever thought he was resisting in the first place. He is just a TV man doing an increasingly terrible impersonation.