Trial by TV: can the media skewer Donald Trump’s presidency?

It is a telling symptom of the sea change that has come over American life that Super Bowl commercials, which would likely have attracted little attention in other years, were suddenly perceived to be not only political, but also pointed critiques of the 45th president of the United States.
Coca-Cola offered a vision of "America the Beautiful" featuring a multicultural array of singers and languages. Budweiser made an advert about one of its founders, a German immigrant who is seen being harassed by English-speaking natives upon his arrival in the US. A Pennsylvania lumber company developed a commercial about an immigrant mother and daughter making their way to America.
What had once been the pabulum of Madison Avenue – America is strong and diverse, "our country" embraces all (as long as they have money to spend) – is now understood by many to be a direct attack on president Donald Trump, and the anti-immigrant hostility unleashed by his campaign, and by his recent attempt to ban entry from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Trump’s impact on popular culture is set to be extensive, with entities from Google to the Museum of Modern Art, which took down some of its Picassos and Matisses to display work by artists from the banned countries, prompted to weigh in. But one of the first places for any such shift to emerge, is across the landscape of late-night television, required to entertain its audiences nightly or weekly with a palette of material formed from the latest headlines.
Celebrities have taken to venting their hostility by tweeting at the president. Trump’s Twitter tirade about Saturday Night Live sketches poking fun at him led to Alec Baldwin, who plays Trump on SNL, replying "Release your tax returns and I’ll stop." Talk-show host Andy Cohen responded to Trump’s recent dissatisfaction with prominent American retailer Nordstrom over dropping his daughter’s fashion line by tweeting "Is there a point when you’re going to start acting like a President?" After Trump tweeted that "We must keep ‘evil’ out of our country", model Chrissy Teigen responded by acidly wondering, "What time should we call your Uber?"
After a year of headlines gloating that John Oliver and Samantha Bee had "destroyed" Trump, it has to serve as cause for re-evaluation of the political-comedy form – or at the very least of the verbs used to describe it – that far from being destroyed, Trump is now the 45th president of the United States.
Being in the opposition is generally beneficial for the programmes or media outlets that symbolically represent the party out of power, as with the rise of The Daily Show during the Bush era or Fox News, Breitbart, and their compatriots during the Obama years. 
But Trump, as a creature of the media himself, presents a marked challenge – one that shows such as Saturday Night Live have already been struggling with. 
How do you mock someone who, while himself incredibly touchy, does not appear to suffer in the eyes of his staunchest supporters when lambasted? What does it mean to be successful in counteracting the Trump presidency when all those same forces were unable to prevent his election? 

Source: The National