Saturday Night Live: Who Will Play President Trump?

Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election caught TV comedy by surprise (South Park had to rewrite an election-themed episode at the last minute last week).

Baldwin is busy with his movie career (his IMDb page lists five projects in the pipeline for 2017-2018 already), and it's unlikely that he will be available or even willing to do Trump on a consistent basis for the next four years.

Trump hosted The Apprentice for the network for 14 seasons before the network fired him last year after his derogatory statements about Mexican immigrants in his campaign announcement.

There are surely hundreds of comedians with serviceable Trump impressions who could be hired to do the job, but if SNL brings in anyone, it should be comedian Atamanuik, who did a searing Trump impression as one-half of a two-person sketch show called Trump vs.

The duo toured the country and appeared on Fusion and Comedy Central and earned rave reviews, so Atamanuik's Trump is a proven success.

Allowing Atamanuik to do what he does would be taking a stand against Trump, which the writers and performers clearly want to do but are not being allowed to by network higher-ups, who want to preserve access to the White House and don't want to risk further alienating an audience that already doesn't like Saturday Night Live (look at what the alt-right did to Leslie Jones for evidence of that).

Therein lies the more interesting and ultimately more important question of how SNL will handle Trump's presidency: will the show poke fun at his personal peccadilloes and let him mostly off the hook for his dangerous ideas (like it did with Will Ferrell's President Bush, a situation that almost seems quaint now), or will it allow its writers and performers to actually express their authentic feelings and give their satire some heft?