If Donald Trump is looking for fairness from "Saturday Night Live," he is looking in the wrong place.
We question whether the late-night NBC comedy show even ought to be on the president's mind, but he made it the subject of one of his ubiquitous tweets over the weekend after the show's opening depicted actor Alec Baldwin mocking the president's Friday Rose Garden announcement about an emergency declaration on the country's Southern border.
"Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!," Trump wrote on Twitter. "Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!"
He followed that with this all-caps tweet: "THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE."
Trump is correct in his description of the broadcast networks and many of their shows. Their news broadcasts hardly pretend to be fair, and their dramas and comedies use partisanship as their First Amendment right.
Specifically, though, he's never going to get a fair shake on "Saturday Night Live" because it's moved from a nonpartisan comedy show to one that wears its politics on its sleeve. After poking fun for years, without meanness and hate, at Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, it jumped the shark with President George W. Bush.
Then, as if to hammer its point home, it kept its lampooning of Barack Obama to a scant minimum before going all out with the current occupant of the White House.
Trump's blanket tweet about a "rigged corrupt media" being the "enemy of the people," however, reminds us of elementary school teachers who used to punish the class for what one or two malcontents had done.
Besides, we're not sure how much the tweet is Trump railing at the show's partisanship and how much of it is just his love for counterpunching.
After all, he should have known network television news lost its partisanship when Richard Nixon took office in 1969, and comedy that buffeted presidents on both sides of the aisle departed with the likes of Johnny Carson and Bob Hope.
Indeed, as a candidate, Trump seemed to understand this. After the networks hyped his candidacy for what it could do for them, they then used every opportunity to bash him once he became the leading Republican. So he appeared to accept that his words would be twisted, that he would be mocked, that his critics would tell only part of the truth.
Nevertheless, so as not to be completely defined by the media, he loved nothing more than appearing at huge rallies where he could give the crowd what it came for - the man in full, complete with off-the-script remarks, hyperbole, insults and boasts. And it's why he still likes such rallies and makes use of them today.
But the president's tweeted "corrupt media" reference includes every member of the profession, and his "enemy of the people" is a pretty definitive declaration.
It would be easy to dismiss his words as just more rhetoric, because he's certainly made the "media equals enemy" reference before. But every time he says it, when he's specifically referring to CNN's Jim Acosta or "Saturday Night Live" or MSNBC, someone or many someones take a dim view of all media.
Like the media that investigate corruption at your local City Hall or the county courthouse, the media that cover your child's high school basketball game or the media that offer you a tearjerker of a story about a dog saving the life of a 1-year-old after a tornado.
All media is not rigged and corrupt, and they're not the enemy of the people.
Now, going forward, the "Saturday Night Lives," the network news broadcasts and the late-night talk shows are not going to be Trump's friends. They wouldn't have been Mitt Romney's or Jeb Bush's or Marco Rubio's friends had any of them been elected president.
For those who remember "SNL's" good-natured humor of Chevy Chase's Gerald Ford tripping over his own feet, of Dana Carvey's perfection of George H.W. Bush's gestures and Phil Hartman's hamburger-loving Bill Clinton, those days are gone.
Likewise, the country's two most influential newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, are not going to wake up one day and give a Republican president a fair shake.
We could maturely suggest that Trump ignore his foes and continue to make his case to the people - and we hope he will - but the president loves nothing more than to punch his attackers. And we feel some of it is deserved - at least opposed to the past when Republican presidents and candidates never defended themselves but allowed themselves to be defined by the media.
But each time he mouths "enemy of the people," the belief in the First Amendment right of freedom of the press takes another licking. And that's far less funny than another tired "Saturday Night Live" sketch about the president.