Kate actually says very little else about Hillary, not because she has little else to say but because she gets too overwhelmed to say it. She tears up when she recalls tearing up when she viewed the presidential debates with Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, another co-head writer from last season, in preparation for devising those weeks’ cold opens. Schneider: “Kate and Chris and I would meet at the 30 Rock offices or we’d pick one of our apartments. I watched as a writer of a satire comedy show, and so I saw everything through the lens of, Can I make fun of that? But I also watched as a woman and I was concerned. I saw some of the attitudes taken towards Hillary—the nasty-woman comment. And I can understand why Kate would get emotional about that.” Though Kate’s Hillary is, obviously, not Hillary Hillary, there is a kind of fusion going on between impersonator and the human being whose skin, soul, and mind the impersonator is inhabiting. To do her job as well as she does, empathy is essential, which means she must stay open and raw where the rest of us—we nonperformers—are hard and self-protective. Psychologically it’s a dangerous place to be. Kate: “I love doing impressions of politicians because the task is always to imagine the private lives of these people whose job it is to project an image of staunch, unflinching leadership and grace, and that’s just not how human beings, in their heart of hearts, work. In doing that for Hillary Clinton, who I admire so much, I started to feel very close to her, just trying to imagine her inner life.” She necessarily takes it personally.

Hillary, et al.

Let’s talk now about Kate’s other impressions. (An F.Y.I.: Kate’s speaking voice is soft, very. The only times I don’t have to lean in to catch it are when she’s doing an impression, at which point self-consciousness disappears because she is no longer herself and thus unthinkingly turns up the volume, and when she’s telling me something she regards as important, and to both make me laugh and to make sure I don’t fuck it up, she yells the words directly into my recorder’s ear. To me, sotto voce, “My most frequent collaborators at S.N.L. are the incredibly gifted writers,” and then to my recorder, in stereophonic sound, “CHRIS KELLY AND SARAH SCHNEIDER!”) A touchstone for Kate is Molly Shannon’s Mary Katherine Gallagher, the Catholic schoolgirl who’s rough on décor and who sniffs her armpit-dipped fingers when she’s nervous: “Mary Katherine is crashing into tables and doing a little dance, and yet she’s so real at the same time. You have to love her so much because she’s a person who’s trying to connect, but is thwarted by everything about who she is. I can relate to that.” It’s the generosity of spirit Shannon brought to the character that Kate responded to, and she brings that same spirit to whomever she’s representing. Says Lorne Michaels, “Kate can embody a character and bring it to life and make it funny. But there’s also always something empathetic about her characters. And although the writing might not be kind, she is. That’s her genius. You can’t make the audience fall in love with a character you don’t like.”

Kate has begun appearing in big roles in major feature films, most notably in last year’s all-female Ghostbusters reboot, which if it did nothing else served to remind us how weird people can still be about women (the outrage on social media that Columbia Pictures had the gall to remake this towering achievement of cinematic expression with cootie-ridden girls—e-e-e-e-e-u-u-u-u-w!—was as amusing as it was depressing), and this year’s bachelorette-party-gone-bad comedy Rough Night. Kate shines in both, but the movies feel slightly beside the point. Maybe because what she’s doing on S.N.L. feels so essential. There’s the pure political theater of her Hillary, of course. Yet there’s also her Elizabeth Warren, her Kellyanne Conway, her Jeff Sessions. Season 42 of S.N.L. had more eyeballs fastened on it than any season since Season 19 (1993-94), and received more Emmy nominations than any season ever, including for Kate and Baldwin, both of whom would win. Election years can often mean a ratings bounce for the show, only this time that bounce went sky-high and didn’t come back to earth, even after the contest was decided.

On Hillary Clinton: “I admire [her] so much, I started to feel very close to her, just trying to imagine her inner life.”

Somehow S.N.L. has managed to locate the center of a culture that’s without one, that’s increasingly fractured. Over the last 18 months or so, politics has become the national obsession, what’s pushing us together as a country even as it’s driving us apart. And to end each week with S.N.L., releasing the pent-up anger and frustration and fear and anxiety with laughter, is cathartic. This, too: the eerily symbiotic relationship that has developed between S.N.L. and the White House. S.N.L. watches the White House in order to satirize it; the White House watches the satirization and then offers notes. Trump tweeted after the October 15, 2016, episode, “Alec Baldwin portrayal stinks.” And yet Trump seems beyond influenced by it, seems haunted. Am I nuts or has Trump, since Baldwin debuted his Trump, squinted harder, pooched out his bottom lip farther? (Observes Baldwin, “He makes this face like he’s snarling and about to leap at you, like he’s in a production of Cats.”) And though purists will argue that Anthony Atamanuik’s Trump or John Di Domenico’s are the more nuanced and artful, it’s Baldwin’s that’s captured the public imagination. Scrambled the imagination, as well. In February, El Nacional, a newspaper in the Dominican Republic, printed a photograph of Baldwin as Trump believing it was Trump. Says Baldwin, “My thought was that if I did a good impression of Trump it would be dull. So I ran towards this idea that I’m going to do a horrific caricature. When you’re doing an impression, you can suggest the voice, or the way the guy looks, but you’ve really got to think of who he is, and get that right, and I think I did. In terms of the media, I’m Trump now. He’s not even Trump anymore—I am.”