Kamala Harris Riffs With Maya Rudolph on Saturday Night Live

The thing about Kamala Harris going on Saturday Night Live—to do a cold open with Maya Rudolph’s Kamala Harris, kicking off a star-studded episode that also featured host John Mulaney, Pete Davidson, Dana Carvey's Joe Biden, Jim Gaffigan's Tim Walz, and the dream leftist-moderate Presidential ticket of Tim Kaine and Chappell Roan—is that what I thought of it doesn’t ultimately matter and what you thought doesn’t matter either. This was a performance with an audience of one. Because Harris is a sitting Vice President who is running for President of the United States, you can’t talk about the success of her SNL cold open except as an act of politics. And because the Vice President is running against a man who A) can be easily provoked to anger and B) cares enough about Saturday Night Live that he's said to have privately asked his lawyers and advisors to look into sending the Justice Department after SNL, the success of this week’s cold open as an act of politics will be determined by how many weird unforced errors it provokes on the part of Donald Trump and his various media surrogates between now and Tuesday. Anything is possible right now. Before Monday is over somebody's going to go on a cable-news panel show and in the process of calling SNL unfunny communist trash will do an impression of Eddie Murphy's impression of Gumby that's so racist it instantly ends their career, and there's a nonzero possibility that person will be Donald Trump.

For what it’s worth, some takes: The only real punchline in it was four words long—“You can open doors”—but Harris made those four words land hard. People on both the right and left will knock the Vice President for goofing around with Maya Rudolph on SNL as part of her closing argument in the final days before The Most Important Election of Our Lives, but her ability to goof around has been among her greatest assets since the beginning of the campaign. It makes her seem like a real person, but more importantly it’s made her seem like someone who does not see herself as engaged in a doomed enterprise, thereby making it possible for other people to believe the same about her. In context, even if the “Pajamalas” stuff was cuter than it was funny, her being there at all was good campaigning in that it seemed like an expression of confidence. On Saturday afternoon, in between the news that Harris’ campaign plane was making a previously-unannounced stop in New York and the moment the SNL cold open began, the legendarily accurate pollster Ann Selzer dropped a poll showing Harris pulling ahead of Trump in Iowa, and people who’d never heard of the legendarily accurate pollster Ann Selzer became instant believers in the legendary accuracy of Ann Selzer, and for a few hours it was like everyone on Twitter had taken a mood stabilizer. In the context of the day, Harris going on SNL seemed like an I got this message to stressed-out Democratic voters—keep calm-a-la, etcetera.

But none of this is that important. The only thing about Vice-President Harris going on Saturday Night Live that matters from a campaign standpoint and therefore from a potential-impact-on-history standpoint is how crazy this cold open will make Donald Trump, and what if anything he will say and do in response. This is what it’s felt like since Trump came down the escalator almost ten years ago: Everything that happens in the world, whether it’s someone making jokes about him on actual network TV or a global pandemic, is part of a great big TV show that Donald Trump watches and reacts to in unpredictable ways. On Tuesday the American people will vote on whether or not they want to go on feeling this feeling for four more years or possibly every year from now until Donald Trump’s eyes close.

Both candidates have spent the final days of the election doing comedy bits on TV. At a rally in Milwaukee on Friday, Trump was deeper than ever in his surly-Catskills-comic bag, fuming at technical difficulties—“I’m up here seething. I’m seething. I’m up here workin’ my ass off with this stupid mic. I’m blowing out my right arm, I’m blowing out my left arm, and I’m blowing out my damn throat, too”—before spinning an I-get-no-respect bit about the microphone issues into an act about having to stoop down to reach a poorly-positioned mic stand. Trump’s been killing with this kind of material ever since Harris entered the race, and the off-the-dome stuff has gradually become the whole act. He’s figured out that the same audiences who cheer for his angry voice—which came out on Friday when he threatened to “knock the hell” out of the sound guys—will also cheer if all he does is get up there and riff and fart around. People have been expecting him to go mask-off in some way as this chapter of the saga winds down and maybe this is the way that happens—him just fully admitting that he wants off this show. As he edges closer and closer to this it makes him seem like a real person, too, albeit a real person who can't believe he's stuck hosting open-mic night at a riverboat casino.

If you've seen any part of the Milwaukee speech from Friday you've seen the part where Trump bobbed up and down at the empty mic stand in a way that made him appear to be deep-throating it, particularly if all you saw of this moment was the seven-second clip that went crazy on Twitter. And when you watch the deep-throat thing occur in context you can see the crowd react, after a second, when they see it on the Jumbotron, as if that’s exactly what has happened—they laugh as if their guy Donald Trump has just done an amazing fellatio joke as part of generally killing it onstage. And maybe he really was doing it on purpose. But if you watch the whole clip, you can also see that Trump looks almost embarrassed when this gets as big a laugh as it does. In almost a decade of reading this man’s facial expressions way too closely this is the first time I can recall him looking ashamed.