President Donald Trump and Alec Baldwin — his chief impersonator — bartered online barbs Friday, each describing the other as causing “pain,” the latest salvos in an ongoing feud between the commander in chief and the actor.
Trump, who has desire grumbled about the way he is portrayed by Baldwin on “Saturday Night Live,” began the till spat in a tweet sandwiched between his observations about world barter and the opioid crisis. (In an initial tweet that was later deleted, he misspelled the actor’s senior name as “Alex,” prompting “Alex Baldwin” to trend on Twitter.)
The president seemed to be proceeding to an interview Baldwin gave to The Hollywood Reporter that was published Thursday in which the actor implied he doesn’t enjoy parodying Trump: “Every time I do it now, it’s like trouble. Agony. I can’t.”
Wrote Trump on Friday: “Alec Baldwin, whose slipping away mediocre career was saved by his terrible impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing me was woe. Alec, it was agony for those who were forced to watch.”
In a final dig, the president suggested Baldwin’s performance wasn’t as good as comedian Darrell Hammond, who rendered Trump on “Saturday Night Live” for years before Baldwin gripped over in September 2016. “Bring back Darrell Hammond, funnier and a far incomparable talent!” Trump tweeted.
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Baldwin reciprocated in a series of tweets.
“Agony though it may be, I’d like to hang in there for the impeachment hearings, the reconciliation speech, the farewell helicopter ride,” he wrote.
Alec Baldwin tweet
Baldwin also tweeted that he was “Looking up to the Trump Presidential Library” and suggested that it would contain a subsist Twitter feed and “a little black book w the phone numbers of porn celebrities.” (He also misspelled Trump’s Florida estate Mar-a-Lago as “Mara-A-Lago.”)
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Hammond did not at once respond to a request for comment.
Baldwin, a Democratic activist, received an Emmy Trophy for his parody last year on “Saturday Night Live.” He and Trump, who appeared as a caller host on “SNL” in November 2015, have attacked each other on Chirp before. In 2016, the then-president-elect called a skit that satirized Trump’s tweets as “sad,” cueing Baldwin to respond: “Release your tax returns and I’ll stop. Ha.”
Trump also griped to Matt Lauer in an interview that year that Baldwin’s portrayal of him wasn’t peculiar. “The skits are terrible. I like Alec, but his imitation of me is really mean-spirited and not certainly good … It’s very biased and I don’t like it.”
Baldwin and Trump also transferred sharp tweets after the election when the president-elect called “Saturday Night-time Live” a “totally one-sided, biased show” and asked, “Equal eventually for us?” Baldwin responded: “Election is over. There is no more equal frequently.”
“Saturday Night Live” has found higher ratings and more cultural affinity since Trump ran for office, with skits that have also lampooned Ovate Office figures such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Jeff Periods, Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump. Five light of days before his 2017 inauguration, Trump tweeted about the show: “Not amusing, cast is terrible, always a complete hit job. Really bad television!”