This ‘MADtv’ Sketch About Donald Trump Evicting ‘Sesame Street’ Shouldn’t Be So Relevant
Today’s installment of MADtv is brought to you by the letter “U” for “Uncomfortably Prescient.”
Donald Trump’s ascent from billionaire real estate heir and reality TV star to despotic president has been such a bizarre saga that efforts to satirize Trump through sketch comedy usually land embarrassingly flat. For every one Saturday Night Live sketch that capitalizes on James Austin Johnson’s impression of our POTUS to make a funny, original and biting parody of the real Trump, there are thousands upon thousands of failed attempts to ridicule and impersonate that which has no shame that litter YouTube, TikTok and other episodes of Saturday Night Live.
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But while the medium of sketch comedy has shown itself to be mostly ineffective at mocking the absurd inhumanity of the Trump administration, almost 20 years ago, MADtv proved itself to be powerfully predictive when it accidentally called President Trump’s ongoing war with the woke terror known as Sesame Street:
Last month, the White House publicly announced its intention to ask congress to rescind $1.1 billion in funding from federally subsidized informational and educational media outlets like the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio over what the Executive Branch considers to be “radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’” Along with the announcement, the White House published a record of transgressions committed by properties belonging to both institutions, with Sesame Street finding itself on the McCarthy list.
According to the Trump administration, Sesame Street deserves to be shut down for its participation in the 2020 CNN townhall special “Coming Together: Standing Up to Racism” during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd. The White House accused Sesame Street of “presenting children with a one-sided narrative” when it spread the dangerously DEI message of “be nice to people of different races” and “Black kids deserve education,” but as MADtv knew in 2006, Trump’s war on Sesame Street is all about that cold, hard cash.
When Trump signed the executive order to stop federal funding to PBS and NPR on Friday, he was simply destabilizing an iconic stretch of property in Manhattan so that he could expand his extensive real estate holdings in the Big Apple. Now that Sesame Street will no longer be propped up by federal funding, Gordon Robinson won’t be able to afford what must be a massive property tax burden for a full city block, and Trump will swoop in to do what his family has always done best — kick a Black person out of their home.
