In a lengthy Instagram video Sunday, Baldwin said that Saturday Night Live wouldn't have poked fun at Trump's diagnosis if the show thought he was "truly, gravely ill." "If there was ever the suggestion that Trump was truly, gravely ill, and people said, 'Trump is really in trouble,' then I would bet you everything I have that we wouldn't even get near that, in terms of content of the show," Baldwin said, according to EW. "They would have done something else. I've seen that happen before...We only have the words of the White House itself and the people who work there themselves to go on, and all of them have all been saying he isn’t in any danger. We only have their word to go by. And if their word was that he was in serious trouble, then we probably wouldn't have done it." Baldwin also defended SNL opening with a debate sketch, even though the Biden-Trump debate was old news by Saturday night. "We thought the debate was something topical, and we didn't have anything with him in a hospital bed, but we had the debate," Baldwin added. "You'd have to have a very good reason to avoid that, topicality-wise, and nobody thought that they were mocking somebody's illness by doing that."
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Jim Carrey delivered SNL's best Joe Biden: "Saturday Night Live has had a few different cast members play Joe Biden in the past, but none has quite stuck," says Allegra Frank. "Biden’s persona is not as immediately defined as Barack Obama’s or Donald Trump’s, which may be why he’s been a bit of a challenge. Instead of asking someone like Jason Sudeikis to come back and reprise the role, SNL went with a much bigger name to take a stab at a Biden impression: Jim Carrey. This may seem like an odd choice to some viewers, considering that Carrey is both one of Hollywood’s greatest hams and Canadian. But Carrey walked on stage all lanky and finger-guns ablaze, his teeth as shiny as the real Biden’s. He exuded the same kind of intrinsic chill that Biden often does, the sense of coolness that was a large part of his persona during his vice-presidential years."
Maya Rudolph's cameo as Kamala Harris was one of the most baffling parts of SNL's much-criticized debate cold open: "Eventually, Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris enters the fray, in a deus ex machin–huh? moment, immediately coded as a mommy figure to the two equally misbehaving childish debaters," says Joe Berkowitz. "No premise is offered to justify Harris’s appearance here, other than that Maya Rudolph, like Carrey, has a contract this season. Her arrival cements the sentiment that both sides are responsible for this debate’s descent into unwatchability, an idea that some major media outlets ran with this week, but filtered through pandering gender dynamics."