“Saturday Night Live” mourned the passing of Hillary Clinton’s White House ambitions by commandeering the death of Leonard Cohen, whose influence on music and popular culture spanned more than 45 years.
And though media loved the memorial service, which had nothing to do with Cohen and everything to do with Clinton, the rest of the country may have been left wondering who, exactly, was the target audience for the extended tribute.
Sitting alone at a piano, SNL’s Kate McKinnon tapped out the melancholy notes to “Hallelujah,” Cohen’s most recognizable work. She performed in character as Hillary Clinton, a role she played regularly throughout the 2016 election.
“I did my best … I’ve told the truth,” McKinnon sang as she impersonated the candidate 62 percent of voters said recently was untrustworthy and dishonest.
Decked out in a white pantsuit and wearing a wig that looked close enough to the real thing, McKinnon looked directly at the camera at the end of her performance and said with as much courage as she could muster, “I’m not giving up and neither should you.”
The press loved it.
USA Today called the performance a “tearjerker,” while a Today Show write-up characterized the moment as “emotional.” Fortune and Time Magazine called it “powerful,” vox.com said it would “break your heart” and National Public Radio was bold enough as to declare it a reflection of “a nation’s emotional tone.”
As far as handwringing responses to the Nov. 8 election are concerned “Saturday Night Live” has ample company.
HBO’s John Oliver, for example, pleaded with his fan base Sunday evening to remain vigilant in an episode dedicated to protesting the election outcome.
“It is going to be too easy for things to start feeling normal — especially if you are someone who is not directly impacted by his actions — so keep reminding yourself: this is not normal,” said Oliver, who had offered in 2013 to cut Trump a campaign check if it would motivate him to run for president.
At TBS, another Jon Stewart protege raged Wednesday against voters for supporting Trump.
“White people, this is the worst thing we’ve ever— no, I’m sorry, that’s a very high bar,” Samantha Bee seethed. “But holy shit, and don’t try to distance yourself from the bad apples and say, ‘It’s not my fault, I didn’t vote for him. Hashtag not all white people.’ Shush. If Muslims have to take responsibility for every member of their community, so do we.”
Last week, as it became increasingly clear late on election night that Trump had a real chance of winning the election, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” successor, Trevor Noah, told his audience that it felt like the end of times.
“This is it, the end of the presidential race, and it feels like the end of the world,” Noah said. “I don’t know if you came to the right place for jokes tonight, because this is the first time throughout this entire race where I’m officially shitting my pants. I genuinely do not understand how America can be this disorganized or this hateful.”
Noah could easily be speaking for the whole of the commentariat class, which was broadsided last week by Trump’s victory.
Performers, pundits, politicos and reporters told their audiences and each other throughout the entire campaign that the billionaire businessman from Queens, N.Y., had no shot at the White House. They said repeatedly that Clinton would almost certainly be the next president of the United States.
Election Day came and went; the GOP nominee landed a decisive victory, leaving his critics speechless.
Nearly half of America supported Trump. He achieved a level of success that almost no one in the entertainment or news industries thought was possible. But with the numbers Trump pulled in, the experts should have seen it coming. The Republican candidate even won territories that supported President Obama in 2008 and 2012.
The reaction in media is not unlike when film critic Pauline Kael reportedly said after Nixon won in 1972, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
Perhaps it was too easy during the election to make fun of Trump voters, and too satisfying to write them off. After all, Trump was such an unserious candidate that only unserious people would support him, entertainers and news pundits assured their audiences.
Trump’s supporters are on the fringes, they said. Their candidate doesn’t stance a chance. Trump supporters don’t know what they’re talking about, they said.
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, it would behoove every public commentator who spoke with certainty of a looming Clinton victory to expand his circle of friends to include those who saw a Trump presidency coming or, at the very least, understood that it was a real possibility.
Maudlin spectacles such as SNL’s cold open, and the over-the-top praise it drew from newsrooms, signal that those who failed both to understand Trump’s broad appeal and to dissuade interested voters from gravitating towards the Republican have learned nothing. Self-serving tributes or scolding screeds aimed at the winning half of the electorate suggest media figures are doubling-down on the perspectives that left them vulnerable to getting the election outcome so very wrong in the first place.
Having spent the election in an echo chamber, media risks more of the same unless it starts talking to – and not at – the other half.
