Later, Killam, briefly an S.N.L. Trump impersonator himself, had to watch his old show and its new star, Alec Baldwin, soar higher and higher without him. But, as he rightly points out, S.N.L. never really acknowledged its own role in the rise of Trump. The closest it came was a now-cringe-worthy moment from last October when, in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape scandal, then host Lin-Manuel Miranda dropped a few Hamilton lyrics while standing next to Trump’s portrait in the Studio 8H hall. It’s almost too hard to watch.

On the notion of S.N.L. benefiting from the Trump whirlwind it helped start, Killam calls out the show more directly:

It certainly feels like there’s some hypocrisy there. I guess you could say, ”Oh, they’re righting wrongs.” And I don’t even think it’s righting wrongs. I think the show tries to—and in particular, Lorne’s outlook is—play to both sides. Play to the masses, play to whatever the popular opinion is. But, boy, they could definitely mine some comedy out of owning up to it, huh?

In failing to take Trump seriously enough in the beginning and then swinging, hard, to the left to capitalize on his unpopularity post-election, S.N.L. is in good comedy company. Stephen Colbert, who practically cuddled Trump when he guested on his show two months before the election, has since (that Sean Spicer gaffe aside) taken on a fiery anti-Trump stance. And John Oliver, who obstinately refused to even bring up Trump on his show until almost a year into the presidential race, is now one of the sharpest and most scathing voices against him. The difference is that both late-night hosts have publicly admitted their early errors, with Oliver saying to Colbert back in 2016: “I didn’t care and I didn’t think I’d have to care. And then it turned out I did . . . None of us thought we were going to be here. But we are.”

S.N.L. shouldn’t have to flog itself in the street over such an old mistake. But as Killam points out, there was potentially some intelligent, self-aware comedy to be mined from such a strong reversal on Trump. The hypocrisy of S.N.L.’s comedy hadn’t really stuck out until this season when “Weekend Update” hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost, who went easy on Trump and absolutely hammered Hillary Clinton up through the election and long after the show at large had changed its tone, re-styled themselves as Oliver and Colbert–esque fiery voices of the opposition. “I think if the media could write whatever they wanted,” Jost joked this week in reaction to Trump’s latest anti-media rant, “they would have reported: Hillary Clinton is the next president.” The joke lands pretty flat when you recall that just a month before the election, Jost and Che were praising Trump as a “smart” and hard-working guy.

A little self-awareness from Jost, Che, and the rest could go a long way, but there may be a reckoning of some sort coming for S.N.L. anyway. Ratings for this season’s Ryan Gosling-hosted premiere were down significantly from both last year’s premiere and finale. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that S.N.L. is always most popular during an election year, but given how the show rode the wave of anti-Trump sentiment all the way into spring, there was some idea that the NBC series might be back for good. But chasing the changeable tide of public sentiment may not prove the winning formula S.N.L. hoped it would be.