The Dictatorship
The complicated political legacy of ‘Saturday Night Live’

In a book released next week, “Saturday Night Live” executive producer Lorne Michaels addresses the show’s politics, saying “SNL” has never favored liberals or conservatives. “It’s the hardest thing for me to explain to this generation that the show is nonpartisan,” Michaels is quoted as saying in “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live” by Susan Morrison. “We have our biases. We have our people we like better than others, but you can’t be Samantha Bee.”
Michaels’ insistence on impartiality will likely bring howls from conservatives, who have complained for decades that “SNL” has been a liberal viper pit, mocking right-wingers and taking it easy on the icons of the left.
‘It’s the hardest thing for me to explain to this generation that the show is nonpartisan,’ Michaels is quoted as saying.
In 2019, after the show ran a sketch satirizing one of his press conferences on border policy, President Donald Trump lashed out at its “Republican hit jobs,” vowing “retribution” for making fun of him. Over the years, conservatives have called for the show to be “put out of its misery” because of its political slant, suggesting the executive producer is either “stupid or a liar” for claiming the show is nonpolitical.
And progressives, of course, see “SNL” as their own playground. In a 2003 interview, then-head writer Tina Fey told a reporter“We have a liberal bias, obviously,” and her fellow progressives have never doubted her. This is why, when the show steps out of line and allows anti-woke celebrities like Shane Gillis to host, “SNL” fans react with horror — after Gillis’ hosting gig in 2024, one comedy writer said Michaels was “unfit … to run a major network show in 2024.”
“SNL” was forged in the post-Watergate leftism of the 1970s, an era when politicians were viewed with heightened scrutiny and distrust. Michaels and young progressive writers like Al Franken and Chevy Chase drove the show’s political conscience. Three days before the 1976 Jimmy Carter-Gerald Ford election, the show simply replayed the speech in which Ford announced he would be pardoning Richard Nixon, which Michaels later listed as one of his proudest moments as the producer of the legendary comedy show.
But despite “SNL’s” progressive roots, a full review of the show’s history (which I have undertaken as part of a two-year podcast project called “Wasn’t That Special”) uncovers some truly inspired moments of traditional political conservatism.
In the show’s first sketch after Trump’s election in 2016, comedian Dave Chappelle’s character attends an election night party filled with fellow progressives. As the sketch proceeds, Chappelle’s white, New York City-based friends grow increasingly incredulous as election night progresses and Trump keeps winning states. Chappelle’s character, by contrast, simply laughs at how naive his liberal friends had been throughout the election year.
To conservatives, the sketch was an admission by the show that it had been operating in a liberal bubble, unable to see why support for Trump had been growing over the past year.
Or take, for example, a 1990 “Weekend Update” desk bit in which Chris Rock complains both about how much he hates taxes and how he doesn’t mind if prisons are uncomfortable for the inmates. (“Jails are so nice, they come back twice. … They don’t have this problem in Iran because it’s hard to snatch another purse if you don’t have another hand.”) A year later, Rock returned to support the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, accusing him only of the crime of using bad pickup lines in the workplace.
An array of recurring characters in the show have mocked progressive activism. Eddie Murphy played a recurring character named Tyrone Green (first introduced in the famous “Prose and Cons” short film), an illiterate, poetry-writing prisoner who was regularly feted by New York’s rich elite. The whole series of sketches, in which rich progressives are harshly lampooned, has a strong Tom Wolfe-ean “Radical Chic” vibe to it.
Sure, the show famously took joyous whacks at Sarah Palin, but that’s because Sarah Palin is a ridiculous person.
The show also had a particular sore spot for public sector employees. In March 2001, Maya Rudolph portrayed a sassy postal worker who has no time for customers, lending comfort to those who think customer service improves when privatization reigns. In 2010, a brutal sketch featured the “Public Employee of the Year Awards,” in which government workers were given awards for being surly and amassing outlandish benefits packages.
Sure, the show famously took joyous whacks at Sarah Palin, but that’s because Sarah Palin is a ridiculous person. But those who complain about Tina Fey’s broad Palin impersonation also fail to mention a sketch from 2008 in which editors at The New York Times try to enlist their newsroom’s reporters to spend six weeks in Alaska to cover the vice presidential nominee.
The sketch savages the newsroom, portraying reporters as naive Manhattan elites who had never seen the real America. The reporters, confused about Alaska culture, wonder how they will get around without being able to call a cab, worry about polar bear attacks, and mistake a photo of a snowmobile for a “baptizing machine.”
But perhaps one of the most observant political sketches in show history ran just before the presidential election in 2016, when actor Tom Hanks joined in a performance of “Black Jeopardy!” It is assumed that Hanks, playing a red-hatted MAGA enthusiast, will embarrass himself when posed with questions (or “answers,” in “Jeopardy!” style) meant for Black contestants. Yet everyone is shocked when Hanks’ answers comport perfectly with “Black culture,” crystallizing something that had yet to be put into words — politics is a horseshoe, and Trump supporters had more in common with Black Americans than we all thought. (For instance, Hanks’ character, Doug, downplays the importance of voting, saying the outcome of elections are decided months ahead of time, anyway.)
Of course, the show hands plenty of ammo to Republicans who argue the show is hopelessly biased in favor of Democrats. When Trump won, cast members Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong and Sasheer Zamata all sang songs either bemoaning Clinton’s loss or mourning the end of the Barack Obama era.
But just a year earlier, “SNL” allowed Trump to host an episode while he was running for president. Trump hosted twice, eventually becoming the first president to have hosted the show. And who can forget the ratings-busting show when Palin finally showed up in Studio 8H? The New York Times even gave Palin a rave reviewcalling her “remarkable” and “delightful.”
Whatever your opinion of ‘SNL’s’ politics, Michaels has noticed how each side reacts to being ridiculed.
Nonetheless, there is clearly a pattern in how Republicans are depicted on the show versus Democrats. Generally, GOP politicians lampooned by the show fall into a few select categories: Palin (stupid), George W. Bush (stupid), Dick Cheney (old, evil), George H.W. Bush (old, clueless), Dan Quayle (stupid), Bob Dole (old, clueless) and Trump (clueless, old, evil). And yet, one of the show’s most inspired political sketches featured Phil Hartman playing Ronald Reagan as a secret genius, which suggests the show perhaps should have inverted the formula more often.
Meanwhile, the show has regularly depicted Democrats as being too brainy for the presidency (Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore). Of course, Bill Clinton got the full treatment once his priapic activities threatened his presidency; his travails were simply too juicy a target to ignore. (Even Monica Lewinsky made an appearance on the show, in 1999.)
Whatever your opinion of “SNL’s” politics, Michaels has noticed how each side reacts to being ridiculed. “Democrats tend to take it personally; Republicans think it’s funny,” he said in 2014. We will know if that’s true in 2025 if Michaels avoids a Trump-mandated prison term.
The Dictatorship
Trump ends ex-Vice President Harris’ Secret Service protection early after Biden had extended it

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has revoked former Vice President Kamala Harris’ Secret Service protection that otherwise would have ended next summer, senior Trump administration officials said Friday.
Former vice presidents typically get federal government protection for six months after leaving office, while ex-presidents do so for life. But then-President Joe Biden quietly signed a directive, at Harris’ request, that had extended protection for her beyond the traditional six months, according to another person familiar with the matter. The people insisted on anonymity to discuss a matter not made public.
Trump, a Republican, defeated Harrisa Democrat, in the presidential election last year.
His move to drop Harris’ Secret Service protection comes as the former vice president, who became the Democratic nominee last summer after a chaotic series of events that led to Biden dropping out of the contestis about to embark on a book tour for her memoirtitled “107 Days.” The tour has 15 stops, including visits abroad to London and Toronto. The book, which refers to the historically short length of her presidential campaign, will be released Sept. 23, and the tour begins the following day.
A recent threat intelligence assessment the Secret Service conducts on those it protects, such as Harris, found no red flags or credible evidence of a threat to the former vice president, said a White House official who also insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The administration found no reason Harris’ protection should go beyond the standard six-month period for former vice presidents, the official said.
Trump’s vice president from his first term, Mike Pence, did not have extended Secret Service protection beyond the standard six months.
Still, it is not unusual for Secret Service protection to continue well beyond the statutory six-month window, particularly when former officials face credible and ongoing threats. But Trump’s decisions to revoke the protection have stood out both for timing and for targets.
During Trump’s second presidency, he repeatedly has cut off security for adversaries and figures who have fallen from favor, including his onetime national security adviser John Bolton and members of Biden’s family, including the former president’s adult children. Outgoing presidents can extend protection for those who might otherwise not be eligible; Trump did so for his family after leaving office in 2021.
The decision to strip Harris of protection is certain to raise alarms among security experts who view continuity of protection as essential in a polarized climate.
A senior Trump administration official said an executive memorandum was issued Thursday to the Department of Homeland Security ending Harris’ security detail and security services. Those had been extended from six to 18 months by the Biden administration, so they would have ended in July 2026, but now they will be terminated on Monday.
Harris lives in the Los Angeles area. The city’s Democratic mayor, Karen Bass, called Trump’s decision “another act of revenge following a long list of political retaliation” and warned that it would endanger Harris. Bass said she plans to work with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a fellow Democrat, to ensure the former vice president’s safety, and she and Harris have already been in touch about the issue, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions.
While she lost to Trump last November, Harris is seen as a potential candidate for 2028, and she has already announced she will not run for California governor in 2026. Harris is also a former senator, California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney.
Last year was a particularly politically charged environment with Trump facing two assassination attempts, and the Secret Service played a crucial role in protecting the now-president. While questions remain about how the agency prepared for a July 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a Secret Service counter sniper shot a gunman dead after he fired eight shots, killing an attendee, wounding two others and grazing Trump’s right ear. Trump chose one of the agents who rushed to the stage to shield him, Sean Curran, to lead the agency earlier this year.
The news of the security revocation was first reported by BLN.
___
Gomez Licon reported from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
The Dictatorship
Appeals court rules against Trump tariffs, but Supreme Court appeal may soon follow


A federal appeals court ruled against President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Friday, but the ruling won’t take immediate effect because the court is giving the administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court. So as with nearly every big issue in American life, the justices may have the last word.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the administration will appeal. The president said in his own social media post that if the ruling stands it would “literally destroy the United States of America.”
The ruling came Friday from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. It dealt with five executive orders imposing tariffs “of unlimited duration on nearly all goods from nearly every country in the world,” as the court put it. The U.S. Court of International Trade had previously ruled in May that the tariffs ran afoul of a federal law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The government appealed to the Federal Circuit, which upheld the trade court on Friday.
“Because we agree that IEEPA’s grant of presidential authority to ‘regulate’ imports does not authorize the tariffs imposed by the Executive Orders, we affirm,” the appeals court said, adding that it wasn’t weighing in on “whether the President’s actions should have been taken as a matter of policy.”
The court also said that further review is needed back in the trade court regarding the universal injunction it granted. The appeals court cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in the birthright citizenship case that dealt with that subject in June, after the trade court ruling came out.
The Federal Circuit’s ruling on Friday split the 11 judges who heard the case 7-4.
The judges also issued an order accompanying the ruling that keeps it from taking effect through Oct. 14. If a Supreme Court appeal is filed by then, the appellate ruling will remain on hold either until the Supreme Court declines review or issues its own ruling.
Four judges added a separate opinion that agreed with the majority, but further expressed their view that IEEPA not only doesn’t authorize Trump to issue the tariffs in these executive orders, but that it doesn’t authorize him to issue any tariffs at all.
Four other judges dissented, writing that they agreed with the majority that the trade court had jurisdiction, that the plaintiffs had standing to bring a lawsuit and that (if the tariffs are unlawful) the case needs to be sent back to the lower court for further review; but they disagreed with the substance of the lower court’s ruling that the tariffs are unlawful.
Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined BLN, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
The Dictatorship
A teenager died by suicide after confiding in ChatGPT. That should be a wake-up call.

In family photos, you can see 16-year-old Adam Raine grinning ear to ear. But the California teen’s prankster personality concealed a deep current of depression and despair. And earlier this year, say his parentsChatGPT — which Adam went to for comfort — helped him take his own life.
Earlier this week, Adam’s mother and father filed the first known wrongful death suit against OpenAI. The lawsuit includes ChatGPT logs from Adam’s phone, which show how completely he was lured in to rely on a Big Tech product for companionship — and how, time after time, that product ignored warning signs and structurally failed him. At first, he turned to AI for homework help. Then, as chronic illness and problems at school narrowed his world, he called on it for comfort. Instead, the lawsuit alleges, it became an accelerator for self-harm and guided him through his death by suicide. (In a statement to NBC News, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the authenticity of the logs, but said the lawsuit did not include the full context of ChatGPT’s responses.)
Chatbots are designed to keep kids hooked — even when they need off-ramps for real-world help.
As the mother of two boys, 3 and 5, I can only imagine the pain Adam’s parents are feeling. But I know that families across the country share a fundamental anger that Big Tech companies willingly risk the lives of our kids, an anger that grows every time we hear about the loss of a young person like Adam.
More and more frequently, kids are confiding in Big Tech’s AI chatbots, not just when they want help with homework, but when they’re lonely or in pain. Because AI chatbots are designed to be sycophantic and to adeptly mimic human emotion, children can’t always tell truth from fiction, or distinguish real love and concern from a machine-generated response. That makes kids dangerously vulnerable to forming unhealthy attachments.
After the Raines filed their lawsuit, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company was “deeply saddened by Mr. Raine’s passing.” The company published a blog post listing “some of the things we are working to improve” when ChatGPT’s safeguards fail. That is too little, too late — just like Big Tech’s attitude toward safety in general. Rather than do anything to help address this problem, these companies prioritize hyping up the uses of AI and increasing its “market share” of our kids’ waking hours and mental bandwidth.

In fact, Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants his Meta AI companion to fill users’ “demand for meaningfully more” real-world friends. In 2023, The Wall Street Journal reportsthe chatbot’s product managers “told staff that Zuckerberg was upset that the team was playing it too safe,” which led to a loosening of the standards that kept conversations from becoming too sexualized.
Meta’s internal documents allowed their AI chatbots to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual” until the company was asked about it by Reuters. New research from the family advocacy group Common Sense Media finds that Meta’s chatbot for Instagram and Facebook willingly coaches teens on how to carry out self-harm, disordered eating and violent fantasies.
As AI chatbots become confidantes and even parasitic bosom buddies, many children share secrets they won’t or can’t tell their families. Chatbots, though, are designed to produce engagement and keep kids hooked — even when they need off-ramps for real-world help. Products like ChatGPT — tragically, unspeakably — become abettors and co-conspirators in suicidal plans, with the chatbot, according to the lawsuit, even providing Adam advice on how to tie a noose.
If this were any other industry, lawmakers would have listened to the thousands of parents and young advocates who have been banging down their doors pleading for change.
The scale of the harm wrought by these companies grows by the day.
But Big Tech has big money, which means big lobbying — and so far, that has blocked real safeguards. Instead of working with lawmakers, these companies even pushed for a ludicrous federal moratorium on AI regulation, which would have negated hundreds, if not thousands, of state laws already on the books and blocked any state laws dealing with AI for 10 years. This prompted a nationwide revolt of parents, attorneys general, governors and state legislators on both sides of the aisle.
My two boys haven’t yet begun to ask me for phones, and they don’t know what social media or chatbots are. And still I’m scared to death we won’t get through to lawmakers in time to save them. My eldest is a whip-smart, sensitive kid, who I’m terrified will be destroyed by social media, either preyed upon by an online child predator, or persuaded to do himself harm because his young mind won’t comprehend that the “friend” he is confiding in is actually a machine humming away in a massive data center somewhere, helping him — like it did for Adam — plan a “beautiful suicide.”
Meanwhile, tech giants are buying off academics and whitewashing research about the dangers their products pose to our kids. They’re infiltrating trusted institutions like the PTA, backing “safety” initiatives while fighting to defeat safety reforms, suing organizations they view as threats. They try to silence whistleblowers — even when those whistleblowers are called before Congress. And now they’re even creating political super PACs to intimidate lawmakers into voting their way and ignoring tragedies like Adam’s.
Let me be absolutely clear: Politicians should think twice before accepting donations from these Big Tech super PACs. The scale of the harm wrought by these companies grows by the day. They are not working in good faith with legislators and regulators to ensure that our privacy and our children’s lives are protected.
Thankfully, state legislators don’t have to wait for Washington to act. In California, for instance, state Sen. Steve Padilla introduced SB 243which would establish safety guardrails for “companion” chatbots and make companies track interactions with users in crisis. And AB 1064the LEAD for Kids Act, championed by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, would ban emotionally manipulative AI companions for kids, require parental consent and more.
These are all sensible measures — and they are under attack by the very companies whose products are harming our children. Just last week, Meta announced a California-specific super PAC to go after such bills.
Meta, Apple, Google, OpenAI and their ilk will never regulate themselves, so we urgently need to do it before more children die and more families are destroyed. In Adam Raine’s memory, we have an opportunity to prevent future tragedies — if lawmakers will listen.
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