"Saturday Night Live" invited President Donald Trump to attend the night that impersonator Alec Baldwin hosted the show in February, but the president declined, Baldwin said on the Ellen DeGeneres Show on Wednesday.
"We were so hopeful he would come, but he didn't show up," said Baldwin, whose lampooning of Trump has boosted the ratings of the show significantly.
Baldwin recalled that he almost did not take the part last summer, at first telling SNL creator Lorne Michaels that "I don't want to play Trump. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. Nobody wants to be Trump on a show or play him on a show."
But Baldwin said the movie he was planning to be in fell through and "Finally, one day I picked up the phone and said, 'I'm Trump, here I come.'"
The actor insisted that he has not seen Trump since he began impersonating him, saying "I can't imagine what it would be like if I ran into him."
Vanity Fair speculated that, by inviting Trump, SNL wanted to create a show similar to when Sarah Palin appeared to confront her impersonator.
But the magazine recalled that SNL was harshly criticized when it did host Trump in 2015 for "normalizing" the controversial presidential candidate and giving him free air time that neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders received, which some said also did harm to the show’s counter-culture status at the time.
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