Story highlights Dean Obeidallah: Baldwin's much-touted appearance as host on SNL wasn't all about his portrayal of Trump

SNL gave airtime to portrayals of key Trump administration staffers and made some great political comedy, he writes

Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio's daily program "The Dean Obeidallah Show" and a columnist for The Daily Beast. Follow him @deanofcomedy. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. Learn more about comedy on CNN's "The History of Comedy" Thursday nights at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

(CNN) Saturday Night Live is clearly no longer content to just comically fillet Donald Trump. As we saw again in this Saturday night's episode, they are increasingly going after key members of his staff. And if recent media reports are accurate, this seems to be rattling Trump and causing dissension within his administration.

Dean Obeidallah

When I worked on the production staff of SNL for eight seasons, we never knew if the politician or the celebrity the show would be mocking that weekend would be watching. But of course with Donald Trump, we do know. It appears he can't help hate-watching the show. Trump has taken to Twitter on multiple occasions to slam the iconic comedy show, even demanding back in October that it be canceled because he was outraged by the way Alec Baldwin and the show depicted him.

Baldwin hosted the show this past Saturday, and if the sole goal of SNL was to drive Trump to Twitter to lash out, they could've featured many sketches with Baldwin lambasting the President. After all, Trump offers comedians an abundance of material. But instead, the show made a decision to focus more on key members of his administration like Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway.

The show opened with Melissa McCarthy reprising her hilarious role from last week as Spicer. This time Spicer tried to remain in control but as time went on he lost it. Soon Spicer was hawking goods for Ivanka Trump's clothing line, which Nordstrom pulled this week for poor sales. And Spicer even comically commented on the racist underpinnings of Trump's "extreme vetting" plan by using a white Barbie doll who easily walks by TSA security agents before a brown skinned "Moana" doll is immediately subjected to a pat down.

Assuming the media reports are accurate that last Saturday's SNL depiction of Spicer got under Trump's skin since a woman was playing Spicer, then the next moment of the cold open must really have angered Trump. That's when his newly sworn-in Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, entered the sketch, played by the amazing Kate McKinnon. And she delivered a great comic line, touching on Session's alleged racist past, "We all know there are two kinds of crime...regular and black."

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