President Donald Trump ridiculed actor Alec Baldwin on Friday, calling his career “dying” and “mediocre.”
“Alec Baldwin, whose dying mediocre career was saved by his terrible impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing me was agony,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
Trump’s first tweet was posted at 5:42 a.m. mistakenly referred to the actor as “Alex Baldwin.” It was soon deleted and corrected.
“Every time I do it now, it’s like agony. Agony. I can’t,” Baldwin told the Hollywood Reporter about his new-found celebrity on Saturday Night Live.
Trump agreed:
“Alec, it was agony for those who were forced to watch,” he wrote. “Bring back Darrell Hammond, funnier and a far greater talent!”
Hammond’s version of Trump was goofy and hilarious, but left-wing audiences loved Baldwin’s version because it was more cruel and partisan.
Hammond was deeply upset when he lost the role as Trump on Saturday Night Live.
“I just started crying,” Hammond told the Washington Post at the time. “In front of everyone. I couldn’t believe it. I was in shock, and I stayed in shock for a long time. Everything wiped out. The brand, me, what I do. Corporate appearances canceled. It was a hell of a shock, and all of it was apparent to me in one breath. That ends me.”
Baldwin has struggled with his role, growing impatient with his parody connection to the president.
“The maliciousness of this White House has people worried … that’s why I’m not going to do it much longer, the impersonation, I don’t know how much more people can take it,” he said in March 2017.
But Baldwin’s decision to stay on as a parody of the president has earned him glowing cover profiles in magazines like GQ and Vanity Fair, extending his career.