By Brian Niemietz / New York Daily News
NEW YORK — It’s another emergency for Donald Trump.
The president has once again called for the NBC sketch comedy show “Saturday Night Live” to be investigated for making fun of him.
“Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!” the President tweeted early Sunday morning. “Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!”
Fewer than nine hours prior to Trump’s outburst, “SNL” opened with actor Alec Baldwin mocking a rambling Friday news conference in which Trump declared, among other things, that the need for a wall on America’s southern border is an “emergency” despite statistics from his own administration that appear to contradict his claim.
Baldwin took the criticism in stride, tweeting, “Trump whines. The parade moves on.”
This is not the first time Trump has suggested “SNL,” a comedy program that has mimicked every president since the show debuted in 1975, should “be looked into.” After the show aired a Christmastime “It’s a Wonderful Life” parody that imagined a world in which Trump never became president, he questioned the legality of the “unfair news coverage” he was getting.
On both occasions, Trump used the term “collusion.” Federal investigators continue to investigate Trump’s campaign staff for possible collusion with foreign agents who worked to get Trump elected in 2016.
“A REAL scandal is the one sided coverage, hour by hour, of networks like NBC & Democrat spin machines like Saturday Night Live. It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials. Should be tested in courts, can’t be legal? Only defame & belittle! Collusion?” the President tweeted.
Trump’s friends at Fox News attempted a conservative spin on “Saturday Night Live” in 2007 called “The 1/2 Hour News Hour,” which lasted about four months. It featured skits by right-wing pundits Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. The show, a flop by most accounts, was “so predictable and so stale that it fails to produce any laughs,” the Chicago Tribune wrote in the short period between the program’s launch and its final episode.
Trump also repeated on Twitter Sunday that “the rigged and corrupt media is the enemy of the people” — all typed in capital letters and punctuated with an exclamation point.
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