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      'We're all part of the story': behind Will Smith's 14th amendment docuseries

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      Chances are it is the most influential amendment to the US constitution that you aren’t familiar with. Given its impact, it is astonishing how little the 14th amendment is discussed in public life. Americans can’t rattle it off like the first and second amendments – but its words have fundamentally shaped the modern definition of US citizenship and the principles of equality and freedom entitled to those within the country’s borders.Sitting at the crux of these key ideals, the 14th amendment is cited in more litigation than any other, including some of the US supreme court’s most well-known cases: Plessy v Ferguson, Brown v Board of Education, Loving v Virginia, Roe v Wade, Bush v Gore, Obergefell v Hodges. And because these noble notions are embedded in the 14th, it has the remarkable ability to generate both boundless hope (for the promises of that more perfect union aspired to in the constitution’s preamble) and crushing misery (for the failures to achieve such promises).The new six-part Netflix docuseries Amend: The Fight for America is a deep dive into the 14th amendment. Ratified in 1868, it gave citizenship to all those born or naturalized in the country and promised due process and equal protection for all people. Amend threads the amendment through the fabric of American history, from its origins before the American civil war to the bigoted violence of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, through the tumultuous years of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, right until today’s feverish debates over same-sex marriage and immigration. The show is a journey into America’s fraught relationship with its marginalized peoples, who have fought to fully be a part of the country.It’s heady stuff for sure, but portrayed with an eye toward educating and entertaining, employing a blend of performance, music and animation, in addition to the requisite experts and archival images. Acclaimed actors breathe life into speeches and writings of key historical figures: Mahershala Ali as Frederick Douglass, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Andrew Johnson, Diane Lane as Earl Warren, Samira Wiley as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Laverne Cox as James Baldwin, Pedro Pascal as Abraham Lincoln, and Randall Park as Robert F Kennedy, among many others.Amend is infotainment expertly done, with the host Will Smith’s affable yet engaged approach gently guiding viewers through moments joyful and difficult. Smith executive-produced the series with the Emmy-winning writer Larry Wilmore, who exhibited his skill at finding humor in dark moments as the “senior black correspondent” on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. “People just don’t know what the 14th amendment is,” Wilmore said to the Guardian. “The first, second and fifth are hogging up most of the oxygen. And yet the 14th has been the most resilient and durable. It’s doing a lot of heavy lifting, but a lot of light has not been shown on it.”Amend helps viewers appreciate the 14th amendment’s unwavering relevance by delving first into its origins. After the Emancipation Proclamation, some 4 million enslaved people were free – but they weren’t citizens, even after fighting to preserve the union during the civil war. The 14th amendment changed that, circumscribing citizenship and providing a roadmap for formerly enslaved people to fully actualize their economic, political and familial lives. It is the first appearance of the word equal in the constitution. “In a lot of ways, our country wasn’t founded in 1776,” said K Sabeel Rahman, a Brooklyn Law School professor. “It was founded by [Ohio representative] John Bingham and Congress passing the 14th amendment because that’s the modern constitution.”The system of labor, wealth and politics by which white southerners had defined themselves was crumbling – but they wouldn’t let it go easily. While citizens and terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan waged violence on black Americans, a popular, persuasive new medium helped propagate the mythologies of the lost cause – and it is partly why many aren’t familiar with the 14th amendment: “The former Confederacy got the final cut on the movie of civil war,” as Smith puts it, with films like Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation shaping the dominant historical narrative.The gauzy fantasy of the noble civil war, coupled with supreme court–sanctioned segregation, ensured the scourge of open racism endured for another century after the 14th amendment’s passage. The 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision ruled that “separate but equal” violated the 14th’s equal-protection clause, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banished Jim Crow segregation. But the calls to enforce the 14th can be heard just as loudly today as in the 60s and 70s: Amend’s third episode draws a tight parallel between the non-violent activism of the civil rights movement and last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, both eschewing moderate calls for patience in favor of Martin Luther King’s “fierce urgency of now”.“We have a set of ideals in this country, and we continue to fail to live up to them,” the activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham said to the Guardian. “Every single time the police shoot another unarmed black or brown or indigenous person, every single time an LGBTQ+ person is fired from their job or left houseless, every time immigrants are stripped of the rights that should belong to them, we are experiencing the gap between what is written and what is true. And the more we grapple with these challenging conversations, the more real we can get not just about the scale of the problem we have to fix but how exactly we can go about handling it.”The amendment is a lodestar for all claiming the constitutional right to be treated fairly. Women, with the help of then attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg, convinced the court in the 1970s that the 14th’s equal protection clause should apply to gender in the same way it is applied to race, both being immutable characteristics that don’t affect one’s ability.But women’s equality depends on control over their own bodies and the choice of when and whether to have children. In 1965, the right to privacy was established, founded on the 14th amendment’s due process clause, and this new concept was applied to Roe v Wade in 1973, which legalized abortion by determining that the decision to end a pregnancy belongs to the woman, not the state. “It’s an unfolding process,” said Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard law professor, of the 14th amendment extending to the right to abortion. “It may not seem obvious as a path, but that is the process of constitutional law.”Indeed, the 14th touches Americans’ most intimate moments. Its passage finally allowed formerly enslaved people to legally marry, and later it was applied to protect the right of interracial couples to marry in 1967 and the right of consenting adults to engage in intimate sexual conduct in 2003. Amend devotes one powerful episode to the story of Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff in the 2015 supreme court case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide and proved that marriage equality too was at the heart of the 14th. (Obergefell admits he had no idea what the 14th amendment was before his case.)More than 150 years after the passage of the 14th, many groups are still actively struggling to realize its promises. Immigrants have long devoted backbreaking labor to this country, only to see intolerant policies, racism and violence trample their dreams. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the only major federal legislation to explicitly stop immigration for a specific nationality, was the result of the supreme court putting fear and misguided claims of national security above the constitution’s expressly provided protections. Dehumanizing and criminalizing immigrant groups to deny their 14th amendment rights has been part of America’s playbook ever since. “We’ve just survived four years of a president who’s been openly racist and has targeted particular immigrant communities based on their race,” said Alina Das, the co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at NYU’s law school. “Equality under the law is something that the immigrant-rights community is still striving for in many ways.”After all, says Cunningham, “the biggest misconception [about the 14th] is that once it’s written on paper, the work is done. The truth, of course, is very different, and I think that Amend really pushes people to see past the veneer of American exceptionalism.” The show sadly but clearly illustrates how ignorance and hate have long fomented misunderstanding, anger, violence and inequality in America and how potently fear and intolerance have prevailed.But it is also just as clear who has the power to make the 14th amendment’s promise of an equal society a reality: not the courts, but we the people, ordinary folks taking to the streets, sacrificing our time, privacy, and sometimes safety, and doing the courageous, often unglamorous hard work of making sure its words have meaning for all of us. “We’re all part of the story of the 14th amendment, and it’s a continuing story,” Das notes. “And the documentary does a wonderful job of inviting people to be part of the living history of the amendment.” As Smith says at the conclusion of the series: “We have to choose to bring 14 to life.”“We’re giving an uplifting message here, not a dour or bleak one, said Wilmore. “There’s a lot of tough material here, but at the end of the day, we’re saying that this is what allowed the promise to happen – this document is the pathway for the promise.” More

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      Saturday Night Live: Regé-Jean Page hosts, cast use Cruz news for boos

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      We open on a Las Vegas talk show, Oops, You Did it Again. Hosted by Britney Spears (Chloe Fineman), who we all know from her “upbeat Instagram videos and the word ‘conservatorship’”, the show is a forum for public apologies.After a much-deserved potshot at Justin Timberlake, Spears welcomes her first guest: Ted Cruz (Aidy Bryant). Sporting cornrows and drinking a piña colada, the Texas senator, who this week got caught vacationing in Cancún amid his state’s energy crisis – and who blamed the whole thing on his young daughters – admits “I’m in a little bit of hot water, which is something I’m told people in Texas don’t have.”Next, Spears welcomes New York governor Andrew Cuomo (Pete Davidson), begrudgingly apologizing for “the nursing home stuff”. It pains him to eat crow, and he reaches breaking point after learning that “bird bitch” Mayor Bill DeBlasio thinks he should be investigated. Still, at least Cuomo’s not as pathetic as Cruz, whose sympathy he harshly rebuffs: “Do not. Associate yourself. With Me. I am a man. You are a clown. If you mess with me, I will send you to a clown hospital. And when you die, I will not count your body.”Last up is Mandalorian actor Gina Carano (Cecily Strong), let go from the Disney show for, among other things, comparing criticism of conservatives to Nazi persecution. She huffs and puffs about cancel culture and asks why Disney has the right to take the moral high ground: “Have you heard Brer Rabbit’s accent on the Splash Mountain ride?” This is a fair point, but having it come from Carano feels way off. Regardless, even she wants nothing to do with Cruz, telling him, “Do not. Associate yourself. With me.”The show gets points for going with an original setup for the cold open, as well as its mercilessness towards Cruz. That said, the cast constantly breaking hampers things. Nothing is that funny.Our host is Bridgerton actor Regé-Jean Page. After a quick Ray Jay Johnson reference that I assume went over his fans’ heads, he fends off the female cast. They’re all obsessed with the sexual dynamo he plays on the hit Netflix costume drama, although Aidy Bryant assures him, “We definitely have other sketch ideas where you aren’t just being an extremely hot sex man.” SNL has shown a tendency to over-rely on hosts’ hotness – see the recent Jason Momoa and Jennifer Lopez episodes, both dire.On Actor’s Spotlight, two black British actors – Kingsley Ben-Adir (Page) and Daniel Kaluuya (Chris Redd) – join Ice Cube (Kenan Thompson) to discuss their new movies. Cube tries to get in on the critical love by pretending he’s British too, claiming, “Me name’s not Ice Cube in Britain, it’s Coldy Squares.” No one buys it until Hugh Grant (Alex Moffat) shows up and recognizes him from the old neighborhood.After a short rap from Ego Nwodim, Davidson and musical guest Bad Bunny about going crazy during quarantine, a barroom game of pool is interrupted when a player puts on Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver’s License. The dudes all make fun of the song, but eventually reveal they’re huge fans. In-depth discussions of the convoluted backstory and reminiscences of their own heartbreak lead to the male cast joining for “the bridge of our lives”.Next, Page interviews for a job at an ad company that works on spec, creating slogans for brands that didn’t ask. Disastrous examples include “Charmin – Use after you poop!”, “Legos – Bet you can’t eat just one and!” and “Netflix – We have porn now!”. Funny as the ads are, and good as the interaction between Page and Beck Bennett’s aloof boss is, the funniest bit is a recurring gag in which Bowen Yang’s harried assistant hands the two strange notes which read “We’re losing millions”, “They have your daughter”, “Your mom is topless in the lobby” and, simply, “Hi”. A bit overstuffed, this zany pre-filmed segment is still one of the best of the season.Bad Bunny takes the stage alongside Rosalía for a steamy duet on La Noche de Anoche. On Weekend Update, Colin Jost kicks things off by hammering Cruz, noting “if you hate Ted Cruz, this is a pretty fun week … and if you like Ted Cruz, well, you’re probably Ted Cruz.” Michael Che notes that the winter storm brought “the most snow seen in Texas since Michael Irvine’s Super Bowl party”.Jost welcomes “relationship expert” Davidson to discuss the “first and hopefully last” Valentine’s Day of the pandemic. Davidson recounts spending the holiday watching the Britney Spears doc with his mom, which convinced him to finally move out and get his own place.“My mom is a lot like this show,” he explains. “No matter what I do, I’m never asked to leave.”After taking a few more digs at Cruz and Cuomo (as well as making a joke about Israel only vaccinating its Jewish populace that’s sure to generate backlash), Che welcomes Jessie Rauch (Heidi Gardner), a community activist who wants to discuss food insecurity. She doesn’t get the chance, as Che can’t get over the fact she’s dressed like Freddy Krueger. I’m not sure what the point or punchline of this was, but Gardner’s silly charm keeps it from totally tanking.A History Channel show looks at sea shanties. A whaling crew sings one, quickly revealing no one knows what they’re doing and they’re all doomed: “Yoho, we’ll never go home/ We’re stuck out here and we’re all alone!” The funniest bit is a brief aside wherein the crew describe to a new sailor their various “sea wives” – a whale’s blowhole, a blanket stuffed into a barrel, two jellyfish tied together, and their hands.A get together between new neighboring families, one white, the other black, sees them engage in a grace-off, trying to one-up each other through gospel. You keep waiting for things to take a dark or awkward turn but everything stays surprisingly sweet. Kudos to Bennett, who shows off some seriously impressive dancing.On the set of Bridgerton, Page and a costar are set to film a sex scene but the intimacy coordinator is out sick. Her replacements are two dirtbags (Davidson and Mikey Day) who have no idea what they’re doing or even what the show is about – they seem to think it involves incest. The set up promises something edgy or risqué, but unfortunately it just meanders.Bad Bunny returns and performs Te Deseo Lo Mejor. Wrestling fans will get a kick out of him proudly sporting the WWE 24/7 Championship belt, which he recently won. I imagine non-wrestling fans will just be confused.The last sketch of the night is a music video set in a grocery store, in which a dopey trio of ironic white rappers keeps getting interrupted and shamed for not wearing masks. It ends with them tasered and tackled by the manager.There was a noticeable patchwork quality to most of the sketches tonight, but that wasn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it led to a lot of unexpectedly funny moments. It also made excellent use of Page’s musical abilities and Bad Bunny’s decent comic chops, the end result a lively, enjoyable episode. More

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      Rush Limbaugh obituary

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      Rush Limbaugh, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer, virtually created the style of political “shock jock” radio that made him so influential. His broadcasts, featuring attacks on opponents as purveyors of what we now call “fake news”, became the template for television’s Fox News, and at its peak played a huge part in Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” of 1994, which recaptured the House of Representatives from Bill Clinton’s Democrats.Limbaugh set the tone for the internet age of politics, calling women’s rights activists “feminazis”, referring to HIV/Aids as “Rock Hudson’s disease” and claiming “environmentalist wackos” were “a bunch of scientists organised around a political position”.He argued that the existence of gorillas disproved evolution, characterised both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) and the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019) as “false flag” operations organised by leftists, and accused the Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe of allowing the Charlottesville rioting in 2017 to worsen in order to boost his presidential ambitions. “Have you ever noticed how composite sketches of criminals always look like [the black activist] Jesse Jackson?” he asked his listeners.When he cut off callers on air, he would play a vacuum cleaner noise, shouting “caller abortion”. His listeners, whom he dubbed “ditto-heads” ate it up, while those who were offended often tuned in to express their disgust. In recent years the independent fact-checking site PolitiFact consistently rated Limbaugh high in terms of “pants on fire” untruths, and just as consistently at zero on truths.Limbaugh (pronounced “LIM baw”) was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, into a family of conservative judges that included his father, whose name was also Rush. His mother, Mildred (nee Armstrong), was the family clown, and encouraged “Rusty” in his love of radio. He did poorly at school, then quit Southeast Missouri State University after a year and found a job with a radio station in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, as “Bachelor Jeff Christie”, but was fired after he told a black caller he claimed to find difficult to understand to “take the bone out of your nose and call again”.He was then fired from a nighttime show in Pittsburgh when new management took over. In Kansas City his morning current affairs talk show on KUDL then an evening talk show on KFIX both ended in sackings for what he described as differences with management; at this point he considered himself a “moderate failure”.He married Roxy McNeely, a radio sales executive, in 1977; they divorced in 1980.By then Limbaugh was working with the Kansas City Royals baseball team in group ticket sales and special events, and in 1983 he married Michelle Sixta, an usherette in the Royals’ Stadium Club. That year he returned to radio with KMBZ in Kansas City, but again got fired for being controversial, in part about the local Chiefs football team. However, one consultant who had enjoyed his KMBZ style suggested him as a candidate to replace the equally controversial Morton Downey Jr on KRBK in Sacramento, California, to which Limbaugh moved in 1984. At KRBK Limbaugh began to attract attention. In 1987, during the Ronald Reagan era, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required users of the public airwaves to allow equal time if they broadcast political opinion. This opened the floodgates to the likes of Limbaugh, and in 1988 he moved to WABC in New York, which became the flagship for a 56-station network broadcast of his show, scheduled, unusually for talk, at midday. By 1990 he had five million listeners.Another godsend for his show was the election of Clinton in 1992, the year in which Limbaugh began a syndicated TV programme produced by the future Fox News boss Roger Ailes. Limbaugh’s deeply personal anti-Clinton campaigning was so effective that when Gingrich and the Republicans re-took the House, they made him an honorary member of the Republican caucus. He and Sixta had divorced in 1990, and in 1994 he married Marta Fitzgerald , an aerobics instructor. He told an interviewer he struggled with love because: “I am too much in love with myself.”The TV show ended in 1996, but on radio Limbaugh went from strength to strength. He now lived in Palm Beach, Florida, where he produced his radio show from his “southern command” centre. In 2003 the sports network ESPN hired him as an analyst on their Monday Night Football broadcast team, but a few weeks into the season he upset viewers by saying that the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated “because the media is very desirous that a black quarterback do well”.It was an especially odd remark given that one-third of the league’s starting quarterbacks were black; that year one of them, Tennessee’s Steve McNair, would be joint winner of the league’s Most Valuable Player award. Limbaugh resigned three days later. The following Monday he admitted to an addiction to prescription drugs, including OxyContin.He was divorced from Marta in 2004, and for the next two years was linked romantically to the CNN anchor Daryn Kagan. In 2006 Limbaugh was arrested on his return from a trip to the Dominican Republic, where he had bought viagra with a false prescription. Although charges were dropped, WBAL in Baltimore became the first station to ditch his show.The George W Bush years seemed to stretch him; he said the US torture of prisoners in 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was “no worse than what happens at a Skull and Bones initiation”, perhaps forgetting that Bush and his father were both members of that Yale University secret society. But just as Clinton had been a godsend, so Barack Obama seemed to inspire Limbaugh to new heights of partisan venom. Apart from claiming that Obama was foreign-born, he accused the president of allowing ebola into the US in revenge for African slavery. When Republicans rallied in the 2010 midterm elections, Limbaugh again reaped much of the credit.In 2008 he had signed an eight-year $400m contract with the Cumulus broadcasting company, and in 2013 he moved his home station to New York’s WOR. After signing a four-year extension in 2018, his income that year totalled $84.5m, second only to one of the original, non-political, fellow shock jocks, Howard Stern. In 2010 he married for the fourth time, to Kathryn Rogers, a party planner. Elton John sang at their wedding reception for a reported $1m fee.In 1992 Limbaugh wrote, with John Fund, The Way Things Ought to Be. Both it and the 1993 sequel, See, I Told You So, were bestsellers. In 2013 he wrote the first in a series of six children’s books featuring a character called Rush Revere – named after the Americn patriot Paul Revere – who goes back in time to have adventures during the American revolution.In 2017, after the ascension to the presidency of his Palm Beach neighbour Donald Trump, Limbaugh joined Trump in suggesting that dire warnings about the possible impact of Hurricane Irma in Florida were fake news designed to push “a climate change agenda”. He quickly became an object of derision when he had to evacuate his home before the storm hit.In January 2020 he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer; he announced it on air the following month, the day before he received the presidential medal of freedom from Trump. Nevertheless he failed to throw his full backing to Trump’s attempts to overturn the election result; he accused the president’s lawyers of failing to support their claims of voter fraud with evidence.He is survived by Kathryn. • Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, broadcaster, born 12 January 1951; died 17 February 2021 More

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      How Trump turned his 2020 TV appearances into one big reality show

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      As we look back at the Trump presidency, it often feels like America has endured four years of reality TV – with its leader as a main contestant.
      Sometimes, life began to imitate fiction – like when Trump lost the election and a storyline from HBO’s Veep started to play out in real life. Near the end of this year’s race, Trump’s supporters campaigned for the counting of votes to be halted in areas where the president was down, and for the counting to continue in areas where he had lost – a plot line so ridiculous it was made for satire. Other times, Trump wrote the script himself.
      We have charted his most mind-boggling moments of 2020, which show how the president turned an institution of governance into theatrics, smoke and mirrors, and entertainment.
      State of the Union

      It has often been said that Trump behavedas president like he did when he hosted The Apprentice. No event more clearly evidenced that theory than his State of the Union address. Usually a stately and solemn event, in 2020, Trump padded it with surprises and giveaways. Watch as a doting mother is reunited with her husband returning from Afghanistan – on tonight’s episode of the State of the Union! Oh, what’s that? A surprise giveaway of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award that can be given to a civilian? Oh, and here’s an even bigger shock: it’s going to the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh for his services to, uh … Well, hold that thought, because here’s another surprise! A surprise scholarship giveaway for a fourth-grade student from Philadelphia! So much for a night that was supposed to be about the country’s true priorities.
      His spats with reporters

      Trump turned press briefings from a forum to keep the president accountable and to inform the world about his policy decisions; to a daily performance ripe with monologues, insults and interruptions. Absolute loyalty was expected, and dissent was treated like treason. Journalists who tried to hold him to account were treated with disdain, interrupted or admonished, with their right to ask further questions revoked.
      Many believe public officials should remain above drama and spats, but Trump seemed unable to stop himself from putting on a show – especially if it seemed he wasn’t “winning”.
      “Be nice, don’t be threatening,” he told PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor when she asked the president about New York’s lack of ventilators back in April. “You’re a fake,” Trump would proclaim to reporters who asked him difficult questions. When asked about the US lives lost to the virus at a press briefing, Trump thought it pertinent to respond to an Asian American journalist: “Ask China.”
      He might as well have been pointing a finger at each of them proclaiming, “You’re fired.”
      His Covid-19 diagnosis

      Of course, the president – who had spent months eschewing social distancing rules and refusing to wear a mask – eventually caught the coronavirus. In the final months of an election, his inner circle started to drop like flies; but he wasn’t going to go down without a show. After finding out he was sick, Trump was flown to the hospital. Ever aware of his image, he made sure he was photographed walking to the helicopter by himself – he reportedly did not want people to see him needing to be assisted out of the White House if his health got worse.
      It wasn’t long before he was in the back of his motorcade, probably still contagious, waving to fans like the reality TV celebrity he’s always been.
      “Maybe I’m immune,” he later announced while doing the rounds on a number of favorable TV shows.
      Soon, Trump was out again, doused in his customary orange fake tan. Standing on the White House balcony, surreptitiously wheezing, he addressed his fans in a scene befitting the Hunger Games. There, he told people the virus was “disappearing” as a threat to Americans. It wasn’t: December was the worst, deadliest month for coronavirus cases in the US on record.
      That photo op

      As protests grew across the country this summer in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Trump must have known how it looked. Here was the president of law and order, sending in troops to fight his own people; the man who fought against lockdown; the man who likened Democratic cities to “war-zones”, teargassing peaceful protestors.
      But Trump knows a picture is worth a thousand words. Before the reality could sink in, of the president who hid in a bunker during the civil unrest, he made sure he had the perfect photo opportunity. His bodyguards parted crowds of choking protesters to deliver it to him: standing outside St John’s Episcopal church in DC, Trump stood with a Bible in his hands, looking sombre, as if the city around him wasn’t on fire. More

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      Saturday Night Live seeks fresh Biden as political comedy faces new era

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      The US presidential election may be over but another keenly watched contest is just beginning. Who should play Joe Biden on Saturday Night Live?Jim Carrey quit the role last Saturday after poor reviews. Alex Moffat, a regular cast member, stepped in for that night’s episode. But it still remains uncertain which actor will portray Biden on a show that helps define each American presidency in the popular imagination.It is just one example of the new challenges facing political satire as Donald Trump leaves the presidential stage. The 45th president offered endless material for late-night TV hosts, standup comedians and cartoonists. His Democratic successor appears to be a less obvious target.“There is about a two-minute hole in every late-night monologue beginning on January 20,” observed Bill Whalen, a former media consultant for the ex-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. “Two minutes every night reserved to Trump jokes and Trump bashing: that ends as soon as Biden takes office. So how do you fill the void?”Based in New York, SNL started on the NBC network in 1975 and has been more or less nailing presidents ever since. Chevy Chase played Gerald Ford as bumbling and accident-prone. Dana Carvey was so spot-on as George HW Bush that he earned an invitation to the White House.Will Ferrell captured George W Bush’s word-mangling incoherence. Jay Pharoah was praised for his Barack Obama impression but left the show prematurely. Whalen added: “Obama they had a hard time mocking because Obama was Mr Cool, and how do you make fun of Mr Cool? So I think comedy took a bit of a time out during the Obama years and came roaring back with Trump.”Alec Baldwin’s devastating rendition of Trump as an ignorant idiot, complete with pursed lips and blond wig, frequently went viral and earned the president’s wrath. Melissa McCarthy’s fast and furious take on his first press secretary, Sean Spicer, also struck comedy gold.On one level it is entertainment, but SNL’s cultural significance should not be underestimated, argues Michael Cornfield, a political scientist at George Washington University in Washington. “The central angle of approach to a president’s character is through the Saturday Night Live caricature,” he said.SNL has already found its Kamala Harris in Maya Rudolph, but Biden is proving a tougher nut to crack. He has been played by cast members and guest stars including Jason Sudeikis, Woody Harrelson and John Mulaney. Carrey signed on for this year’s election campaign but his manic performances arguably missed the mark.“Jim Carrey was doing Jim Carrey,” Cornfield observed. “He didn’t communicate Biden.”So Moffat, who has previously played Trump’s son Eric, took over as Biden for an opening sketch in which the vice-president, Mike Pence (Beck Bennett), received a Covid-19 vaccine. But Moffat is only 38, less than half Biden’s age, leaving next year’s all-important casting an open question, along with broader questions of where to find humour in the coming presidency.Cornfield commented: “To me, the comedy of the administration shapes up as one of these workplace sitcoms where the central character, Biden, has to be carrying on gamely while everything around him is going nuts.“Biden’s personality is tough because you don’t want to make fun of his stuttering. You don’t want to make fun of his tragedies. What you want to make fun of is he’s going to pretend that everything is right: ‘Oh sure, I’ll negotiate with the Republicans. No problem. Oh sure, I’ll make the federal government work. No problem.’ That’s his pretence and that’s up for lampooning because it won’t.“Now having said that, I don’t think it will be what we’ve lived through the last four years. We don’t need [Armando] Iannucci-level viciousness because I don’t think that’s called for. But there is a need to make fun of the president. That’s very American.”Cornfield has a suggestion for the role: Ted Danson, who turns 73 next week and appeared with Harrelson in the long-running sitcom Cheers. “He’s got that big smile and that cocky how-you-doin’ demeanor and he knows how to react to people who are just not doing the job or are completely nuts. There’s great comedy to be had when somebody is trying to pretend that everything is is going smoothly when it’s not.”Even so, just as cable news is reportedly bracing for a loss of viewers after the “Trump bump”, political satirists could be forgiven for thinking that a golden age is coming to an end.Trump’s crass remarks, badly spelled tweets and bizarre behaviour – from gazing up at a solar eclipse to slow-walking down a ramp – have been the gift that keeps on giving. It is safe to assume that Biden will not suggest bleach as a coronavirus cure.The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver are among the TV programmes that have thrived on dark humour in the Trump years, making sense of the chaos for viewers, channeling their anger and fear and conveying a pointed message.Colbert now draws far more viewers than his late-night rivals Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, neither of whom targeted Trump so directly. He also had a hand in Our Cartoon President, a barbed animated series about Trump and his entourage.Stephen Farnsworth, co-author of Late Night with Trump: Political Humor and the American Presidency, said in an email: “From President Trump’s angry, blustery falsehoods to his clown car entourage, Saturday Night Live and late night comedy have never had it so good. When America has an over-the-top president, one who needs to be in the public eye 24/7, the jokes practically write themselves.“That ends in January. When compared to the current president, Joe Biden is a far less compelling character for humor and doesn’t display the same neediness for public attention. What’s more, Trump’s exaggerated physical mannerisms and speech patterns, captured so effectively by Alec Baldwin, made him easier to imitate than many political figures.”Farnsworth, political science professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, added: “Biden is much more measured in what he says and does than is Trump, and that’s not good for comedy. Biden used to be known for a malapropism or two, but his 2020 campaign was a highly controlled exercise, particularly compared to Biden’s time as vice-president or as a senator.”Trump’s departure, however, is also coming as a relief to comedy performers and writing. There are have been moments when he can seem beyond satire and when it is easier to cry than laugh. A novelist might find him frustratingly two-dimensional.Steve Bodow, a former head writer and executive producer of The Daily Show, told the Washington Post last month: “I feel confident saying most writers of late night will not only be politically and patriotically happier, but they’ll be comedically happier. The thing about Trump is there’s nothing new there; there’s just not that much to chew off the bone. It can be utterly exhausting.”Trump was a Falstaffian figure but the consequences of his actions, especially during the deadly coronavirus pandemic, were anything but funny. Biden’s own life has been scarred by personal loss and he inherits a country facing multiple crises – and where Trump is likely to remain a political player.Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, said: “The larger-than-life element about Biden is tragedy. Making fun of his speech is making fun of someone who through immense willpower overcame the disability of stuttering.”He added: “The one person who gets Biden best is Stephen Colbert, who, like Biden, is a deeply rooted liberal Catholic.“The fundamental problem is that we have yet to reckon with the immensity of the mourning and grief of what will likely be a half-million dead, which should have been largely preventable by the clownish sadist who provided so much fun before he ushered in a reign of death.” More

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      in US Politics

      Fox News retracts Smartmatic voting machine fraud claim in staged video

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      Fox News has taken a further step back from Donald Trump’s baseless allegations of election fraud with a bizarre apparent legal retraction aired during shows hosted by some of the president’s most fervent supporters.First broadcast on Fox Business on Friday, on Lou Dobbs Tonight, and repeated over the weekend on shows hosted by Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, the segment was presented as a news interview with election technology expert Eddie Perez.In the three-minute video, described as “a closer look at claims about Smartmatic”, Perez answers questions posed by an unidentified interviewer about a Florida company that provided voting systems for the November election.Perez is asked questions such as “Have you seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to flip votes anywhere in the US in this election?” and “Have you seen any evidence of Smartmatic sending US votes to be tabulated in foreign countries?”He says he has not seen any such evidence.Earlier this week, Antonio Mugica, chief executive of Smartmatic, sent legal notices to Fox News and two other networks promoted by Trump, One America News Network (OANN) and Newsmax, assailing them for spreading “false and defamatory claims” in a “disinformation campaign”.“They have no evidence to support their attacks on Smartmatic because there is no evidence,” Mugica said in a statement. “This campaign was designed to defame Smartmatic and undermine legitimately conducted elections.”Trump lost the election to Joe Biden by 306-232 in the electoral college and trails by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote. But his false claims of voter fraud and irregularities in voting systems and technology have received sympathetic hearings on the three rightwing networks.The Fox News interview with Perez was described by a network source as “a fact-checking segment aired in the same format” as original reporting about Smartmatic.Speaking to CNN, Perez said: “My reaction was to observe, as many others have, how kind of strange and unique that particular way at presenting the facts was.“There was nothing in any of the preliminary conversations that I had with Fox News that gave me any indication that Smartmatic would be a matter of conversation. It was never mentioned that this was going to be a discussion about Smartmatic or even claims about private vendors. I was anticipating a broader discussion about the debate around the election [and] election integrity.”Perez said Fox News’ coverage of the election was “speculative and not based in fact” and conspiracy theories peddled by hosts were “harmful to enhancing public confidence in the legitimacy of election outcomes”.“I am not accustomed to seeing Lou Dobbs air very straightforward factual evidence,” he said.A Fox News spokesperson declined comment. Earlier, the network referred CNN back to the video.Erik Connolly, an attorney for Smartmatic, said the company would not comment “due to potential litigation”.In a statement to CNN, Newsmax denied making direct claims of impropriety against Smartmatic and said questions about the company and its software were based on “legal documents or previously published reports”.“As any major media outlet,” Newsmax said, “we provide a forum for public concerns and discussion. In the past we have welcomed Smartmatic and its representatives to counter such claims they believe to be inaccurate and will continue to do so.” More

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      in Elections

      MSNBC cuts away from Trump's address after he again falsely declares election victory – video

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      MSNBC anchor Brian Williams stopped broadcasting Donald Trump’s remarks after the US president falsely claimed ‘If you count the legal votes, I easily win’. The anchor’s interruption came less than a minute into Trump’s news conference, with Williams saying, ‘Here we are again in the unusual position of not only interrupting the president of the United States but correcting the president of the United States’
      Why are the media reporting different US election results?
      Trump v Biden – full results as they come in
      Senate and House elections – full results as they come in More

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      Can late-night comedy recover from the Trump presidency?

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      As the results trickled in on election night 2016, Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Show on CBS, processed Donald Trump’s victory live, before a shocked audience. He lamented America’s partisan divide (“how did our politics get so poisonous?”), professed belief in the utility of comedy (“in the face of something that might strike you as horrible, I think laughter is the best medicine. You cannot laugh and be afraid at the same time”) and offhandedly prefigured the identity crisis to come for late-night television: “I’m not sure it’s a comedy show any more.”
      Colbert performed the role of late-night host nimbly, even if the genre of an election night comedy hour was poorly suited for the victory of a candidacy that had been viewed by many as a joke. Trump, as the TV critic Emily Nussbaum argued in January 2017, had long performed, and audience-tested in rallies, the role of a boozy, heckling, aggrieved standup comic, one who shrugged off countless taboos as “sarcastic” jokes, one with an endless appetite for attention.
      Nussbaum’s essay, published in the first week of Trump’s presidency, evinced the trap facing liberal political comedians: “How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?” How do you skewer a performer who never made any attempt at sincerity? How could network and cable comedy, overwhelmingly delivered by straight white men, effectively lampoon a self-evidently ridiculous social media troll whose only currency was attention? Trump may have seemed at the outset like a boon to jokesters, but his presidency – the flat denials, the destabilizing cascade of crises and a fractured, contemptuous media landscape – has killed political comedy.
      Where does late-night go from here? Regardless of whether or not Trump is re-elected, his presidency has altered the genre in form and function. For four years, political comedy, and in particular late-night television, has lurched through a cyclical Trump attention loop: hosts mock the president, Trump continues with the next galling lie or lashes out on Twitter (or both), hosts mock Trump again, attention paid and courted and repaid. In the 2010s, as the lines in American cultural commentary blurred – political propaganda, social life and memes blended in a gorging timeline of content – Trump jokes became the default late-night currency. Even Jimmy Fallon, the affable Saturday Night Live (SNL) alum who infamously tousled Trump’s hair in 2015, was forced by a ratings war into more political monologues.
      In the Trump era, the genre has morphed to shoulder two burdens: to metabolize liberal outrage through short-circuited Trump jabs (Seth Meyers’ Closer Look segments, SNL’s too-numerous cold opens, whose main insight seems to be the sight of various celebrities game for impersonation); and to process the torrent of headlines in our confounding, infuriating, oversaturated reality.

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      The latter is not an insignificant function, given the time and sanity-erasing blankness of constant disruption and, say, a global pandemic. During the nationwide protests against anti-black police brutality this summer, late-night shows helped keep people tethered to, rather than escape from, the feverish timeline of deeply unfunny police crackdowns and ongoing pandemic surges. Many people got the gist of impeachment, the Mueller report, the Russia investigation, Trump corruption and justice department manipulations through late-night comedy shows. (The leading program, Colbert’s Late Show, averaged 3.45m viewers in 2019-2020; Saturday Night Live drew 8.24m viewers for its 46th season premiere last month, its highest audience since 2016.)
      There’s certainly a democratic function to that processing; when everything is politicized and the news landscape is calcified either in bad faith propaganda (Fox News) or norms of impartial politeness (the Sunday talkshows), late-night “comedy” – a pastiche of recaps, clips and jokes delivered by a host allowed to call bullshit – becomes a manageable way to keep up with things. But that doesn’t mean it was necessarily funny or sustainable or, to quote Colbert on election night, really a comedy show any more. Kimmel and Fallon seem to view jokes as a formality before the more entertaining work of interviewing celebrities; Late Night’s Seth Meyers has almost dispensed with jokes entirely in his outrage-laden, indignant Closer Look warnings on America’s descent into authoritarianism.

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      Late-night political comedy, following the model of The Daily Show, built a common language through the George W Bush and Barack Obama years: point out bad faith and dishonesty through videos stitched with hard news reports, then voice collective outrage at the con. But the past four years have undermined the belief that comedy could serve as an effective weapon against an administration whose reality show is outdone by its horrifying, very real “accomplishments”. The late-night shows once seemed to get under Trump’s skin, but to what effect? He might call the hosts “very weak and untalented” on Twitter, or continue his longstanding feud with SNL (and especially his impersonator, Alec Baldwin, although his attention for late-night shows appears to have waned this year). But in a polarized, post-hypocrisy world, jokes don’t so much thwart the hypocrite as draw viewers back into the reactive loop.
      The host perhaps most successful at navigating the Trump years, and the most critically acclaimed, is John Oliver, whose unsparing, morally clear, melodically ranting explainers on HBO’s Last Week Tonight focus on the rot around or tangential to Trump, rather than the man himself. Full Frontal’s Samantha Bee similarly works in allusive jokes around issues-driven monologues, as one of the few female hosts and a rare success in the 2010s boom and bust of liberal news comedy shows which evince the struggle to break fresh ground in the Trump era. The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj, The Opposition With Jordan Klepper, Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas, The Jim Jefferies Show and The Break With Michelle Wolf all premiered after January 2015, and have all since been cancelled.
      Sharp-toothed political comedy, meanwhile, has shifted to the masses on social media, and in particular TikTok. Political accounts run by Zoomers, which overlay pop music on bespoke factchecking, dances, healthcare advocacy and nihilistic memes, have become “cable news for young people”. Sarah Cooper’s lip-syncing Trump impressions blew up on TikTok and Twitter, leading to a guest-host gig on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. But her Netflix comedy special, Everything’s Fine, slams into the wall of Trump-centric satire and exemplifies the dilemma of traditional comedic forms; absent the fundamental insight of her impressions – that nothing satirizes Trump more than his own words – comedy rooted in the destabilizing chaos of the current moment sprouts starchy, disposable bits, jokes that strain when they should zing.
      What, then, can late-night comedy do? The shows do, after all, retain huge audiences, with institutional legitimacy and social media platforms that reach millions. Their guest slots can and have elevated diverse and “radical” perspectives, such as prison abolition advocates and Black Lives Matter activists. In 2020, late-night TV has gained the most cultural cachet when it embraces not redundant Trump jokes but the flexibility of the format – performing the duties television journalists refuse to do, for example, such as Colbert’s grilling the motives of the former Trump adviser John Bolton.

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      Ironically, it’s perhaps most relevant when it’s serious, self-aware, stripped down. In June, Trevor Noah released a quarantine-filmed video in reaction to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, in which he spoke plainly to white audiences as a person of color, a child of apartheid South Africa who understood state violence. “That unease that you felt watching that Target being looted, try to imagine how it must feel for black Americans when they watch themselves being looted every single day,” he said. “Because that’s fundamentally what’s happening in America: police in America are looting black bodies.”
      Noah’s video was shared widely on social media and cited by activist Kimberly Jones in Minneapolis, whose words were then incorporated in an episode of Last Week Tonight. More recently, Colbert has straight-up implored people to vote out the president; “We have two weeks to decide what kind of country this is gonna be,” he said last week, in reaction to news that the administration still had not reunited 545 children, separated from their families at the border, with their parents.
      There’s no laughter in such statements, no finding humor as an antidote. Earnestness – anathema to internet humor – is an awkward spot for late-night comedy to find itself in. But it’s cutting through bullshit, the leg work of sorting context and promoting inquiry, where late-night comedy can still find wiggle room, fresh territory with or without Trump. It’s not so much telling jokes as telling it straight – humor as a prerequisite but not the punch. More