Baldwin extends Trump gig
Satirical memoir will imagine first year in office
On the phone from New York, Alec Baldwin chuckles in response to a question about how he’s doing.
“I’m spending the day talking about Trump, so how good could I be?” he asks.
Specifically, he’s scheduled for a day of press about his new book with humorist Kurt Andersen, You Can’t Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President.
It’s their idea of what an honest memoir written by the U.S. president might look like, inspired by Trump’s unbridled, unrehearsed communication style.
The Trump that Baldwin and Andersen have imagined never pauses to consider how brash or ridiculous his self-aggrandizing monologues might sound to other people.
The book paints Trump as a petty narcissist with no self-awareness who congratulates himself, at 71, for remaining married to a 47-year-old.
“What we decided is, Trump is basically incapable of being reflective,” says Baldwin, who has famously impersonated Trump on Saturday Night Live.
“What would Trump sound like if he tried to be reflective? He would mess that up, obviously.”
Baldwin says he welcomed the opportunity to extend his SNL impression to a longer, more detailed characterization. But the character is the same, he says: the Trump of the book, like the Trump of SNL, is unhappy.
“I’ve chosen to play him filled with bile,” he says.
“Trump is miserable no matter what happens. If he wins the election, he’s miserable. If he loses, he’s miserable. I just tried to make him the most miserable person I possibly could.”
One of the biggest challenges in putting the book together was simply keeping up with Trump’s rapid shifts in focus.
“Of course we said things to ourselves like, ‘Do we withhold the publication of the book if Trump gets impeached?’” Baldwin remembers.
“It was actually a conversation about that: Would Trump last until the book is over?”
He says comedy is a necessary antidote to what’s going on the news. Without comedy, Baldwin says, “you can’t live in this country, especially with the kind of vulgar, ceaseless, metronomic droning of the media today.”
“People need some — I’m not going to say narcotic, but they need some digestif, if you will, something to take along with this meal that they’re forced to eat.”
Baldwin has now been performing as Trump for over a year, but he says he’s managed to avoid letting the president’s behaviour or mannerisms seep into his everyday life.
“I don’t find myself going to a restaurant and saying, ‘I want to have an omelette with some wheat toast,”’ says Baldwin, suddenly breaking into his Trump voice.
“‘No butter, hold the butter, I don’t like butter, don’t put any butter on it’ — you know, erupting into Trump on a dime like that.
“When it’s over I have that shower like you see Meryl Streep have in Silkwood, where they scrub all the radioactive material,” he says. “I go home and I scrub it off.”