Alec Baldwin dropped into “The Tonight Show” Thursday to do dueling Donald Trump impressions with Jimmy Fallon — and took a swipe at Ivanka Trump products dumped by Nordstrom.
“I got this suit from the Ivanka Trump men’s collection at Nordstrom’s,” Baldwin quipped to Fallon. “Big sale right now, 95% off of everything.” The company’s decision to dump Ivanka’s products due to “poor sales” triggered an angry tweet from her father, President Donald Trump, and possibly an ethics investigation for his senior adviser KellyAnne Conway for plugging Ivanka’s products during a TV interview.
The two funnymen were soon trading Trump impressions as they played the “Tonight Show” game “Box of Lies.” Baldwin turned it on first as he described a burrito from Honduras. “The Honduran who delivered this burrito to the studio, we had him deported,” said Baldwin’s Trump character.
It was a bit of a warm up as Baldwin prepared for another impersonation of Trump on “Saturday Night Live,” which he’s also hosting this weekend (for the 17th time). In an earlier interview Thursday, the actor confessed that it’s “not a lot of fun” to play the president.
“I think I enjoy being a part of it. But playing him is not a lot of fun. He’s tense, he’s angry, he’s pissed off — and that’s not always fun to play,” Baldwin explained in an interview on “Extra” with his wife, Hilaria Baldwin.
Baldwin said he was surprised Trump didn’t change once he won the White House.
“My God, I keep coming back to the same thing, which is that he won,” he noted. “I thought he would have settled down, and relaxed, and said, ‘Hey man, let’s everybody kind of chill. Let’s focus.’ ... The president sets a tone.”
Trump clearly watches Baldwin’s characterizations of him but pronounces them unfunny.
As for digs against him this week by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Baldwin brushed them off in the “Extra” interview. Spicer said at a press conference that “Alec has gone from funny to mean, and that’s unfortunate.”
“What’s he supposed to say?” Baldwin said when asked about Spicer’s comments.
“All those guys are working for Trump, they work for the president, the office of the president. They’re going to say what they need to say to, you know, fit in, go along to get along,” he added.
“That’s I think symbolic of where we’re at, which is why we repeat back everything Trump says,” he noted.
“Doing this is strange, but what is even more strange is this is real,” he added. But “people need to laugh. They are upset.”
Despite Trump’s frequent tweeted complaints, “SNL” is having its best season in 22 years.
Melissa McCarthy’s impersonation of Spicer last week was a hit, garnering nearly 20 million views on YouTube in less than a week.
”Saturday Night Live” airs Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. ET on NBC.
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