Alec Baldwin worries Trump impression has backfired, makes president ‘cuddly’: Report

The outspokenly liberal Alec Baldwin admitted to Sen. Bernard Sanders recently that he fears his impression of Donald Trump on “Saturday Night Live” may have backfired, Entertainment Weekly reported Wednesday.

Mr. Baldwin made the admission in an interview with the former Democratic presidential candidate on the Oct. 3 edition of his “Here’s the Thing” podcast, a production of WNYC Studios.

“In terms of Trump, do you think we’re making him a little too cuddly, a little too funny, and we’re taking people’s minds off stuff that’s a little more serious?” he asked the socialist legislator from Vermont, according to EW.

Mr. Sanders replied that critics of the president need to focus on policy concerns and not get distracted by, for example, the things he tweets.

“I think what we have to focus on, on Trump is what he is doing,” he said, “You know, every day you says something that it’s absurd. But think about this is a guy who told the American people he was going to provide good health care for ’everybody,’ remember that?! He supported throwing 32 million people off of health insurance. This is a guy who, you know, made all kinds of promises to working people, and he has turned his back completely on them.”

Besides Trump, Mr. Baldwin and his guest discussed Mr. Sanders’ strong primary challenge to Hillary Clinton and why the 74-year-old Vermonter gave Mrs. Clinton, and the entire Democratic establishment with her, such a run for their money. For his part, Mr. Sanders largely credited his refusal to court big-money donors and his cultivation of small contributions from the Democratic base.

“But one of the things that we understood from Day One is that it was important for us not to develop a super PAC,” Mr. Sanders said. “We said to the people, look, we’re not going out to billionaires. … We end up, as is now well known, getting millions of contributors, contributions, averaging $27 a piece. And that was historical.”