Will Donald Trump or Kamala Harris Cameo on ‘SNL’? (original) (raw)
Don't count on it, says executive producer Lorne Michaels. At least pre-election, he explains why he'll be sticking with his stable of impressionists, including Maya Rudolph and James Austin Johnson.
Donald Trump, Lorne Michaels and Kamala Harris. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; Kristy Sparow/Getty Images; Win McNamee/Getty Images
For the time being, Saturday Night Live viewers will have to settle for the show’s political impressionists.
In a recent interview ahead of the show’s 50th season, SNL creator and long-running maestro Lorne Michaels revealed that he hadn’t reached out to the real-life candidates, and he didn’t intend to before the 2024 election. “You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, and then clarified: “You can’t have the main candidates without having all the candidates, and there are lots of minor candidates that are only on the ballot in, like, three states and that becomes really complicated.”
Michaels has focused his attention instead on the mix of new and returning performers that he’s tapped to impersonate the Washington, D.C. power players, including Kamala Harris (Maya Rudolph), Tim Walz (Jim Gaffigan), Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) and J.D. Vance (Bowen Yang). In the same interview, part of _THR_’s most recent cover story, Michaels said that he saw the show’s 50th season as an opportunity to bring back former castmembers and friends of the show, which he also did with both Dana Carvey (who played Joe Biden) and Andy Samberg (Douglas Emhoff). Of course, just because bringing on the real-life political figures is complicated doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In fact, it’s been done before.
Most notably, in November 2015, SNL had Trump host the program in the midst of what was a contentious Republican primary, with 13 candidates all vying with Trump for the GOP nomination. As SNL writer Bryan Tucker would later tell THR, “People had different opinions about him being there at that time, but during that week, he was in second place in Iowa, behind Ben Carson. He was definitely a national phenomenon, but he was not imminently going to be president.”
After his hosting gig, NBC tallied exactly how many seconds he appeared on screen — 12 minutes and five seconds — then offered his opponents the same amount of free airtime in primetime or during _SNL_‘s time period. (Years before, Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin appeared in a sketch less than a month before the 2008 election, pairing Tina Fey’s impression of Palin with the real deal, but no equal time concerns were raised by the Obama campaign at the time.)
The FCC equal time rules were established by the Communications Act of 1934, and require broadcasters to give rival political campaigns equal access to the airwaves ahead of an election. While there are exceptions to the rule — news events being the big one, with the FCC saying that “bona fide newscasts, interview programs, certain types of news documentaries, and during the-spot coverage of bona fide news events” are among the exceptions — they apply to campaign commercials as well as entertainment programming. (In fact, during Dr. Mehmet Oz’s 2022 Pennsylvania Senate campaign, episodes of his daytime talk show were pulled from stations that served Pennsylvania as the FCC determined that it would qualify as a triggering event.)
Once in office, Trump took issue of his treatment by SNL. He tweeted that the FCC and FEC should look into the veteran late-night series because of its “one sided” sketches about him, and suggested that he should be given equal time as a result. Michaels, for his part, has long maintained that this show is neither left- nor right-sided, but rather is against whoever is in power. Or as “Weekend Update” co-anchor Michael Che put it, “it’s about seeing the truth and pointing out that the emperor is not wearing clothes.”
Michaels doesn’t seem to rule out having the real-life politicians on the show, post-election — and though he has every intention of going hard after both the right and the left in the lead-up, he doesn’t foresee that impacting his chances of getting them on the show. “Everybody knows what we do, and I think we’re going to do it again. It’s what we’re supposed to be doing,” he explained. “So, what’s interesting is if you say to the people that we just did that to, ‘Do you want to come on because we have a way to do it with you in it?’ They almost always say yes.”
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