Here’s how past presidents have reacted to Saturday Night Live
By Matt Moore
Bill Clinton
President Bill Clinton was another who had multiple cast members portray him on Saturday Night Live. Both were fantastic and shared some similar characteristics in depicting the 42nd president.
Phil Hartman was the first to play Clinton, adding a second president to his list of impressions. Hartman’s version displayed many of the traits that made Clinton popular with voters and helped him win the 1992 election.
The sketch above is probably the quintessential Hartman-as-Clinton sketch. It shows him as a man of the people with a soft spot for fast food. Only one of those are similar to the current president.
It also features Clinton delivering a line on how there would be a lot of things that don’t get back to Mrs. Clinton. That would turn out to be the basis for Darrel Hammond’s version of the president following the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Prior to that incident, Clinton was reportedly amused with how Hammond played him on SNL. The president laughed along while Hammond was in character with him during the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner in 1997.
Chances are the President Clinton didn’t laugh so much at later versions of himself on SNL in which he was more and more of a smooth-talking ladies man prone to ogling. Yet that didn’t stop his wife and future presidential nominee Hillary Clinton from stopping by the show.
So if President Clinton and his wife can maintain a relationship with SNL after it used the president’s adultery for laughs, why can’t President Trump do the same when the show makes fun of him?