Alec Baldwin Explains How It Feels To Have The President Publicly Trash You

Anyone who has seen the 1993 Kevin Kline classic Dave knows that being a presidential impersonator comes with its fair share of ups-and-downs, whether you're riding pigs during appearances at state fairs or romancing your lookalike's estranged wife. But even Dave didn't have to contend with his satirical target using his platform as the most powerful person in America to regularly grouse about his 'terrible' impression.

That, however, is what Alec Baldwin's life has been like for the past seven months. Not that he expects anyone to feel sorry for him.

"My wife has a line, it's a wonderful line," Baldwin said. "If I'm whining, kvetching about something, my wife will turn to me and say, 'Nobody feels sorry for Alec Baldwin.' She'll turn literally to anybody on the street corner, 'Do you feel sorry for Alec Baldwin? Anyone? Anyone?'"

Since October, Baldwin has donned the orange makeup and the bad wig, contorted his face into an angry stress ball, and repeated the word "Gyna" enough times to turn it into a mantra for his portrayal of Trump on Saturday Night Live. The show may have been off the air for most of the month of March (Baldwin only appeared in one of two episodes broadcast at the start of that month), but that didn't stop Trump from complaining about him in a recent interview: “I think the Alec Baldwin situation is not good,” he told Fox News' Jesse Watters. "I think the portrayal of me is ridiculous."

At a recent meal in Greenwich Village, I asked Baldwin whether he got any sort of kick out of knowing how much he riled up the president: "Yeah, when the president talks about me that way, it just makes me more sad that he's the president that he's got his mind on that."

"I think Trump is sick," he added. "I'm not going to say mentally ill, because that doesn't have the connotation that he's dangerous. I think Trump is incompetent. I think Trump is mentally incompetent to be the president, and that may be proven, by the way."

Baldwin has reached a bizarre moment in a career filled with bizarre moments: he's never been more popular than he has been since he started spending his weekends playing the least popular president in American history. He readily admits that playing Trump has revitalized his career—it's a point he also makes in his recently-released memoir, Nevertheless—but it has left him uneasy as well.

"There's been a career renewal for me, which I'm very grateful for, and I'm not going to say that it's come with a cost," he said. He's still processing the reaction he gets when he's in public, which is "exaggerated" compared to what he used to receive. "Yes, people have come up to me and just beat that to death, people will thank me, congratulate me, they beam some kind of positivity toward me all day every day about the Trump thing. But in the end what I'm wondering is...how that's going to manifest itself in 2018 and 2020? Tuning in on SNL and appreciating what we're doing, I wonder just how that manifests itself in terms of their politics."

"It's a renewal for me in terms of career, but that's not enough, because I honestly don't have any pretensions, I don't, that anything that we're doing is going to influence the election, because obviously it didn't prior to the election," he continued. "We were on the air several weekends before early November. It had no affect on that, but I'm wondering, now that the shroud of a literal Trump presidency has descended on everybody fully, if that's changed people. Some people who were on the fence and said, 'All I know is I hate Hillary, I hate Hillary,' Hillary hating was a big thing, so when they come rolling into the next election, even the midterms, are they going to come to their senses? We can't take any credit for that, but that will be renewal for me if what we've done results in something."

It feels unfair to me to put so much emphasis on comedy (or on celebrities) to act as a line of defense to combat or solve political problems, let alone to "save us." Satirists throughout history have chipped away at the facades of the powerful, but no one has claimed that Rich Little took down Richard Nixon, or Will Ferrell did anything but make George W. Bush seem more cuddly. It's unfair and absurd to suddenly expect someone like Jon Stewart to run for president, or for John Oliver to demolish Trump with 26 minutes of broadcast time a week.

Baldwin is certainly not the only Trump impersonator out there—he may not even be the best one, depending on your tastes—but he has the largest platform, and he has the president's attention. And just last week, the Daily Beast reported that he was “irked” after seeing the cold open below, in which Baldwin's Trump deferred to "President" Steve Bannon, who was depicted as the Grim Reaper. Bannon sat at the Oval Office desk while Trump played with a kid's toy at a smaller desk. "Did you see this crap?" Trump reportedly asked a confidante.

I asked Baldwin whether he had any interactions with Trump around the city in the years before he ran for president, and whether he picked up on any particular mannerisms or details that informed his impression, but he said Trump was barely a presence socially: "[I saw him] very infrequently," he said, calling Trump a "back-slapping" kind of guy. "Trump was someone, and I don't necessarily judge him for this because there's a lot of people like this in New York, he was very much into the drive-by photo op. Get in there, picture, picture, picture, gone. He never lingered. He was not a table-hopper. He was in and out for the press hit, largely for his foundation...and then he was gone. He never lingered anywhere I went."

Most of the time, Baldwin talks about Trump with a mix of disgust and disbelief: "[He has] no patience for details, and just says, 'Go, go, go, try to keep up with me. Your problem is that on a political level and on a business level, I'm Mozart. I'm a genius. I'm a Mozart in a world just lined with Salieris jealous of my acumen.'" But having played Trump twelve times on SNL now, I asked whether he felt he had anything in common with him, whether he had any greater understanding of him. It was clearly something he had thought about, because he immediately drew a comparison between his own fights with the media and Trump's.

In certain times in my life, [I thought] that the press hadn't portrayed me, they hadn't communicated what I wanted communicated, and I felt not just disappointed that they didn't communicate what I wanted communicated, I thought that they were unfair, and even out to get me. I got very, very paranoid. I read an article, in which someone said this is, 'Getting in touch with your inner Nixon,' that they're all out to get you.

Later on when you mature a bit, you realize that it's a game you're all playing and you just need to play it better. If you say something, then you said it. If it didn't come out the way that you wanted it to, did the piece not come out or is what you said didn't come out the way you wanted it to? With Trump, I look at him and I see that we're people, we're Trump to someone who doesn't feel appreciated for what he's done. That's a trap we can all fall into.

"Sometimes I feel sad for him," Baldwin continued. "Like any man who is a father, he has children, he has grandchildren. There's a very good chance, it's not guaranteed, that his name will become a punchline. For the rest of their lives. Then they lose their businesses. The Trump name, they took it all off the Riverside Boulevard buildings as you know. I think that I feel sad for him, because I genuinely feel sad for anybody who is put in the stocks by the press, whether they earned it or not."

But his sympathy only can extend so far with someone he feels was completely disqualified to be the president: "But with Trump, at the same time I thought to myself, there's an expectation. His pain emanates from this expectation he had of being treated a certain way, and he did nothing to build out that reality. With Trump, there was no transformation, there was nothing before he went after that job."

Baldwin has been reticent to say whether he'll continue to impersonate Trump on SNL in the future (though he is currently writing a satirical memoir in the president's voice), but he says it's not because he feels like SNL humanized Trump too much, as some critics have suggested—it's more about scheduling. "It's only a question of not knowing where we're going to be," he said. "There's a chance we might go to Europe in the fall."

He still left the door open to returning: "It's something that I would do, and in all likelihood I will do, but I have no idea where I'm going to be in September and October," he continued. "The season starts in early October, and the point is, if I'm in Rome doing a film, no, I'm not flying back here on Saturday night to do the show. While I was in town, and while this worked, it was great. It was a great experience. If I'm around I'll do it, but who knows where we're going to be."

And as for any uneasiness he feels regarding stepping into Trump's shoes, and how that has been a redemptive moment for his career, Baldwin is hoping to participate more with groups like MoveOn.org to "keep a flame going" and help organizations "interested in talking about larger issues in politics and gerrymandering... Let's take the positive from Trump. Trump has reinvigorated democracy. People are so scared. They're thinking, 'We didn't think it could be this bad, and it could get worse.' It could get worse."

Check back next week for the full interview with Baldwin.