Lorne Michaels Reflects on His ‘S.N.L.’ Legacy Ahead of the 50th Anniversary

I happened to be there that night, when then-candidate Trump got the most laughs in one sketch by gamely dancing to Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” a precursor to his “Y.M.C.A.” rally dance. The mood at that after-party was very strange. Some in the cast were furious, believing that the gig could help Trump become president. In 2017, Taran Killam, a former cast member who sometimes played Trump, told N.P.R. that the Trump episode is “something that only grows more embarrassing and shameful as time goes on.”

But Michaels, sitting at a back table of the restaurant as usual, looked serene that night. I saw a couple of cast members awkwardly come up to tell him that Trump was not such a bad guy; some of them greeted Trump, while others avoided him. Trump himself was euphoric about his performance, sitting at a table with Bill O’Reilly and his family, strolling around the restaurant like a maitre d’.

Political sensitivities come into play with a largely liberal cast that is expected to satirize both sides of the aisle. Everything is copacetic when Maya Rudolph does a cozy sketch with Kamala Harris on the cusp of the election. As the famed former “S.N.L.” writer Jim Downey told Morrison, the show sometimes seemed like “the comedy division of the D.N.C.”

After a show in February 2016 in which Larry David, brilliantly playing Senator Bernie Sanders, was joined by the real Sanders, I talked to Michaels about the show’s politics.

“People are always looking for us to be on the side of Clinton, and that’s not what we do,” he told me. “If Trump is ascendant, then we will be discussing that.” He was prescient then about the reality show star, noting that the scorn heaped on him recalled the scorn initially heaped on another entertainer-turned-politician, Ronald Reagan.

“There’s a smugness to that attitude that causes the voting public to go, ‘We’re smarter than that,’” Michaels said. “Donald’s giving voice to what polite society sort of sat on for a while, things that are felt but that no one is articulating. There is something happening there, or it wouldn’t be resonating.”