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Jack Donaghy would be convening meetings to try to reclaim the Republican Party. Jed Bartlet wouldn’t have much to say to Donald Trump at all.


In the latest Off Message podcast, that’s the read from Alec Baldwin, who played the Ronald Reagan-obsessed head of NBC on “30 Rock,” and Bradley Whitford, who played deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman on “The West Wing.”

“Literally, like during one episode,” Baldwin said, imagining how Donaghy would’ve handled Trump, “I’d be having a lunch with [Mitt] Romney, I’d be having breakfast with [John] McCain, I’d be having dinner with George Bush, we’d have all the top cardinals of the Republican Party in my office to talk about, ‘What are we going to do about this guy?’”

“I think Jed would say, ‘Why don’t you go read up on this and then get back to me?’” Whitford said, conjuring the response of the learned liberal played by Martin Sheen.

Neither actor can stand Trump. They’ve taken different routes in response.

A year and a half into putting on a swooping blonde wig and cartoonishly puckering his face as a Trump caricature on “Saturday Night Live,” Baldwin has penned a parody biography of Trump—complete with photos of himself in full “SNL” makeup in front of the actual Trump Tower and a country club that doubles as the White House—a story that ends with a fantasy of the president holed up in his apartment, having a breakdown. (Baldwin’s co-author, Kurt Andersen, says he believes this to be “a much more plausible scenario than many others, like the fact that he actually becomes presidential forever and coherent and rational and consistent.”)

Despite inhabiting the character for so long, Baldwin said he hasn’t gotten any real insight into the president, but he expressed shock that he hasn’t seen 10 months on the job change Trump. “He’s not someone, it seems, that we’re going to have any effect on anything. He’s not going to go away,” said Baldwin, going on to compare the president to Mr. Potter, the villain from “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Whitford has translated his anger at Trump’s election into being a public face for Get America Covered, a private group formed to promote Obamacare sign-ups during the open enrollment period running through December.

“The right understands what I believe to be the truth, which is that politics is the way you create your moral vision. The left, and certainly Hollywood, thinks culture is the way you create your moral vision. And my frustration is I want the left to understand that ‘Will & Grace’ is meaningless without DOMA and that we need this political follow-through,” Whitford said.

“The right loses an election; they run for school board, and they start a think tank,” he continued. “The left loses an election, and we say, ‘The system is corrupt,’ and we don’t participate.”

Whitford acknowledges that his show was “liberal porn,” and says that’s precisely why a Trump character would have never made it into a “West Wing” episode.

“If I went into the writers’ room at ‘West Wing’ and pitched Donald Trump as a character, it wouldn’t work,” Whitford said. “It would seem pejorative and condescending.”