Alec Baldwin is defending the “Saturday Night Live” sketch that saw him reprise his role as President Donald Trump over the weekend, while the president remained in the hospital after being diagnosed with COVID-19, according to USA Today.
Some viewers felt the sketch — which featured Baldwin squaring off against Jim Carrey as Joe Biden in a parody of last week’s presidential debate — was in poor taste, after President Trump tested positive for COVID-19 last week and was hospitalized, USA Today reported.
But in an Instagram video Sunday, Baldwin claimed the sketch would not have joked about the president if his health had been reported to be “in serious trouble,” according to The Hill.
“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 in the video, according to Entertainment Weekly. “They would have done something else. I’ve seen that happen before.”
The sketch took jabs at some of Trump’s responses to COVID-19 and his nicknames for the disease, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“The China Virus has been very mean to me by being a hoax, and that statement will not come back to haunt me later this week,” Baldwin said during the sketch, according to THR.
At another point in the sketch, Carrey as Biden said, according to The Hill, “You can trust me because I believe in science and karma. Now just imagine if science and karma could somehow team up to send us all a message about how dangerous this virus can be. I’m not saying I want it to happen. Just imagine it did.”
Baldwin said in the Instagram video that the show took its cues from the White House and Trump’s doctors, according to Fox News.
“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,” Baldwin said in the video, according to Fox. “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 said he does not believe it’s appropriate for people to be wishing the president ill during this time, according to Fox.
“There are a lot of people out there who have the deepest amount of animosity I could possibly calculate in my adult life toward Trump, but there’s a line they won’t cross,” Baldwin said, according to Fox. “They wouldn’t say, ‘I wish something happened to him,’ or that he died, or whatever. And people who do that, that’s not the way it should be.”