Love him or hate him, you just can’t ignore him: Donald Trump’s guest turn as host on ‘Saturday Night Live’ over the weekend has helped the NBC show record its highest ratings in three years, with a whopping 6.6 household rating.
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Donald Trump, making his first appearance on Saturday Night Live as a presidential candidate, was satirised by two well-coiffed doppelgangers, who attempted (admirably) to outboast him in matching red ties. Flanked by Taran Killam and Darrell Hammond both dressed as the Donald, Trump was talking about the show when Larry David interrupted him by yelling out “you’re a racist“. Latino group Deport Racism offered a $5,000 reward for any audience member that called Trump a racist.
“I heard if I yelled that, they’d give me five thousand dollars”, David, who later reprised his role as Bernie Sanders, said.
While it appeared to be more of a joke poking fun at DeportRacism.com’s promise to pay whoever heckled the host, the non-profit group said it would give David his winnings, “joke or not”.
Prior to the episode NBC has come under mounting pressure to cancel Trump’s appearance due to his racist comments towards Mexicans in his presidential announcement speech. In fact, Trump’s overnight rating was 47 per cent higher than the Clinton episode.
For candidate Mr Trump, whose many interview and debate appearances have drawn large audiences, a surge in this week’s SNL ratings seemed assured.
Trump’s known penchant for tweeting was also integrated into the show – as well as his not-so-talked about dance skills, put to use during a recreation of Drake’s viral video “Hotline Bling”.
Real-life Donald Trump doesn’t follow that advice.
The question that we wonder now is this: Is the equal-time rule that important? Thus, the Live+3 day numbers and the Live+7 days numbers should also show vast improvements compared to previous weeks on the show.
“I get the best ratings”, he supposedly said before the show. But leading up to Saturday’s broadcast, NBC did not respond to accusations that it had reversed itself, or to the outcry against Trump that had built since “SNL” announced his host booking last month.
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What did you think of the performance by Larry David on SNL?
