I It’s a tough time for women in US – but satire will help
was in America over the weekend. Well, actually, I was in Democratheavy California, which barely considers itself part of the United States any more after Donald Trump’s presidential victory. Most people you meet there will tell you how depressed they are by the current state of affairs and then say they can’t bring themselves to talk about it any more, only to continue to talk about it for a not inconsiderable length of time.
The chatter was not so much about Trump, as the brilliant ravaging of his press secretary, Sean Spicer, on Saturday Night Live by the actress Melissa McCarthy. With a side parting and badly-knotted tie, McCarthy does a freakishly convincing impression of Spicer, right down to his perpetually raised voice and difficulty over pronouncing foreign names.
It is such an accurate and hilarious performance that Trump is said to be offended, particularly by the notion that a woman can so successfully impersonate a male government figure (although it might just be because someone else is getting more attention than he is).
On the same show, comedian Kate McKinnon took on Trump’s senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, portraying her as a crazed, oversexed psychopath stalking the CNN chief political correspondent in the dead of night because of her desperation to “get on the news”.
A few years ago, when Sarah Palin was running as the Republican candidate for vice president, Tina Fey did an impression so convincing that when the two of them finally met on screen, it was genuinely difficult to tell them apart. The actor Rosie O’Donnell recently posted a photo of herself on Twitter dressed as Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon, and it can surely only be a matter of time until she too appears on SNL taking aim at the current administration.
It’s a tough time for women in America. Trump has made no secret of his wish to roll back abortion rights, and one of his first acts as president was to reinstate a law that removes funding from NGOs if they so much as mention termination as an option for pregnant women. Vice-president Mike Pence wants to consign the abortion ruling Roe v Wade “to the ash heap of history”, and only three of Trump’s 19 cabinet appointees are female. But at least there is one area in which American women are at the head of the pack – and that’s satire. Long may it continue.