Blog 8: Pop Culture and Politics

Pop culture and satire media really can have a large impact on the way people view others, especially those who are in politics. The pop culture that the public is exposed to is another way for someone to push more campaign material without the public really being aware that they are being exposed to such material. Since the media in the current age is more liberal it was evident that the republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would be the topic of many late night and SNL jokes.

The artifact from pop culture that I used was a skit from a Saturday Night Live episode. This was an opening skit that portrayed Trump’s first presidential elect press conference. The

ever so funny Alec Baldwin played Donald Trump. Alec really embodies Trump and emphasizes some of his characteristics in order to really make the audience aware of these exaggerations when observing Trump’s actions in reality throughout the campaign and his political career.

This SNL video and many other SNL skits with Alec Baldwin playing Trump all have a pattern of how Trump is portrayed. Alec has the orange skin and the fluffed up hair that looks like a wig but is apparently not a wig while he wears the red power tie and navy blue suit. Image may be viewed as unimportant, however his image and other candidate’s images are what they are identified by. Trump’s get-up was the tagline for many jokes, which was something that took away from his and Hillary Clinton’s platform. The emphasis and importance placed upon a candidate’s image is extremely superficial, but it is a facet that the audience and media gravitate towards for placing judgment.

In this clip from SNL they recreate a moment that is crucial to the president elect’s political timeline. This is the moment that he is being asked to represent all Americans while being able to articulate reasoning for some of his early actions that were taken. In the address itself Baldwin tries to convey to the audience Trump’s use of short charged phrases and his ability to get questions from the media and completely spin what he would talk about to fit his agenda. Baldwin takes on Trumps facial expressions and hand gestures.The SNL skit also emphasizes Trumps inability to speak in eloquent phrases, his rhetoric is more common to lower educated individuals.

This SNL satire piece takes away from the image Trump would assume want to protect. Throughout the entirety of the presidential campaign Trump definitely had some not so great media coverage. The SNL skit I think mostly shows Trump as a caricature figure that doesn’t seem real. He is like the cockroach that never died within the campaign and I think his success as a candidate was underestimated because of how he was represented in the media prior to running. I don’t think that pieces like this SNL one really severely hurt him however. After all of the media and pop culture out there he was still victorious which I think goes to show how the public uses these outlets for entertainment but know better than to judge a candidates legitimacy from this type of media.

This clip does effectively change the way people perceive Donald Trump. Alec Baldwin does do things within his characterization that Trump does as well, but by focusing on the lesser important nuances of Trumps characterization and making his press conferences and speeches a joke it takes away from any validity that his points he made may have had. Exaggerations in media on political figures in some ways are like a magic trick. The magician leads the audience to something he wants the audience to look at while with a slight of hand hiding the facets of a characterization that may be a positive attribute.