Joy Behar is up in arms right along with MAGA over Tom Hanks’ portrayal of a Donald Trump supporter on Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary special.
On Tuesday’s The View, Behar agreed with Trump’s supporters who melted down Sunday night after seeing Hanks reprise his role as “Doug” in the Black Jeopardy! sketch from 2016.
“The fact remains that they’re making anyone who voted for Trump look like a racist, and that’s why they’re mad,” Behar began after the show rolled a clip of the sketch in which Doug, while donning his MAGA hat, is scared to shake a Black man’s hand.
“I personally would never do that, because I don’t believe that any group is one thing,” Behar continued. “A lot of these people [who voted for Trump], in my opinion, have been misled. They thought that grocery prices would come down. They’re up. They thought inflation was coming down. It’s up. They thought that Medicaid was safe. It’s not. They thought Social Security was safe. It’s not. So it’s not only racism that caused Trump to be in office. We have to remember that,” she said. “So of course they’re going to be insulted.”
Right-wing commentators immediately made their outrage known on social media after the clip aired Sunday, with online personalities like Mario Nawfal describing the sketch as “tone deaf” and opining that Hollywood “doesn’t get it” since it’s “portraying Trump supporters as racist caricatures while he’s winning record minority support.” One MAGA-supporting former aide called out the sketch for featuring the “tired trope that MAGA is racist,” and called it “disgusting.”
Behar agreed Tuesday, comparing the Black Jeopardy! sketch to Bill O’Reilly’s comment during a 2010 episode of The View that “Muslims killed us on 9/11”—which prompted Behar and Whoopi Goldberg to storm off set.
“It’s the same thing,” Behar said, “and if they can do it to them, they can do it to us. So that’s the whole point.”
Co-host and former Trump aide, Alyssa Farah Griffin, who’s been the president’s fiercest defender on the show since he was re-elected, was surprisingly less vexed by Hanks’ character on Sunday. “ I personally think the outrage over it is a little overblown,” she said.
Sunny Hostin pointed out that the moment in which Hanks’ Doug hesitated to shake hands was a harkening back to the viral clip in which Senator Deb Fischer’s husband’s seemingly ignored Kamala Harris as she reached for a handshake after his wife’s ceremonial swearing in.
Still, Behar insisted that the sketch should have taken a page out of Steve Martin’s monologue from earlier in Sunday’s show, as he was able to criticize Trump indirectly with quips about the “Gulf of Steve Martin” and ICE arresting his Canadian friend Martin Short. “Those are political points that don’t insult individual people,” she concluded.
