Like clockwork, Donald Trump made use of his now-presidential Twitter account to criticize the latest Saturday Night Live cold open. “Saturday Night Live is the worst of NBC,” he tweeted Sunday, adding: “Not funny, cast is terrible, always a complete hit job. Really bad television!” Yet while the president-elect was busy grabbing an aide to dictate his latest insult, his appointed press secretary Sean Spicer spent much of Sunday and Monday defending the White House’s latest tenant from further assault.
The former Republican National Committee spokesperson on Sunday told Fox News host Howard Kurtz “Saturday Night Live used to be funny, and it’s gone from being just funny to bad. Those aren’t jokes. They’re inappropriate.” Much of the language Spicer used, including the all too obvious insult directed at SNL, repeated the same sentiment Trump had earlier expressed on Twitter. As a result, the new White House communications director’s latest round of talking points were born.
“What Saturday Night Live did on Saturday was disappointing,” he told Today‘s Tamron Hall and Willie Geist the next morning. “It was not funny, it was mean-spirited and it’s gone from being a show you could sit back and get a good laugh out of to being something that’s frankly mean and bad television.”
Along with his employer’s ongoing spat with Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia) and the transition team’s mistakenly claiming Trump would visit the new Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, Spicer made the morning talk show rounds discussing Trump’s latest spats while trying to emphasize the administration’s efforts to repeal Obamacare. Whether or not he thought the media’s incessantly asking about SNL was also mean-spirited remains to be seen.