Saturday Night Live has never been shy about launching attacks on former host Donald Trump, filling its programming over the last few years with swipes against the current president that range all the way from tepid to “mildly cutting.” One of the best, though, wasn’t aimed at Trump himself—because it’s depressingly difficult to effectively make fun of a clown—but at his daughter Ivanka, the closest thing the current administration has to a fresh, socially acceptable face. SNL’s writers took aim at Ivanka’s extremely relative position as the “good Trump” in a commercial parody that ran back in March 2017, a pleasantly mean-spirited bit of satire called “Complicit.” And apparently, Ivanka herself would not stop complaining about it, which is, frankly, as hilarious as anything in the ad itself.
Sadly, this, like so many juicy details currently circulating about the Trump White House, comes from a source which suffers from a certain unfortunate deficiency of credibility: Unhinged, the new book by once (and probably future) Trump associate/reality show contestant Omarosa Manigault Newman. There is, by all accounts, a lot of shit being talked in Unhinged—including the expected innuendos about Trump’s weirdly bragging/doting relationship with his elder daughter—but for some reason we’re very tickled at the bit about Ivanka getting stung by a video in which Scarlett Johansson swans around vapidly, pretending to be her. According to Manigault-Newman:
At the senior staff meeting, Ivanka couldn’t stop bemoaning it, how offensive it was, how ridiculous it was. We’d all been subject to SNL attacks … We’d all been hit, many of us in that same week’s show. But Ivanka would not stop talking about being ribbed. Like her father, Ivanka was thin-skinned and could not seem to take a joke.
And while we obviously have to take this with our daily FDA-recommended dosages of salt, it’s the sort of thing that, deep down in our black little hearts, we desperately hope is true.