Hubba sees damage in SNL's portrayal of Trump
Analyzing the article
San Francisco Chronicle
Our Analysis: 5 Fallacies
I'm a high school English teacher. ...I'm becoming concerned about SNL's depiction of Donald Trump as a farcical figure.
He's not farcical. He's a traitor, 1 cut from the same cloth as Jefferson Davis and Julius Rosenberg.
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Trump isn't just a traitor. He's 2 a clear-and-present danger to our way of life.
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Earlier this year, 3 a student told me Jan. 6 was a positive example of mob power. He explained, "Now we know we can stop the government when they cheat us."
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4 "He's (Trump) the villain in every '80s movie," said Derek Shuttleworth, an 11th-grade English teacher. "Uncaring, malicious, spiteful, deceitful, craven, disdainful of knowledge, sarcastic in the way of wisdom."
Biden-Trump 2.0 isn't your average presidential horse race. And it cannot be treated as such, even in a satirical sense. The stakes are too high.
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Trump is plotting a return to power by promising to imprison his political adversaries. His reelection campaign, "Make America Great Again ...Again," is openly discussing plans to fill the federal government with "loyalists," a private network of yes-men that feels awfully 4 gestapo-ish. If he were to regain the Oval Office in 2024, 5 he'd 100% "fight like hell" to remain there in perpetuity. What makes me say that? It's exactly what he tried to do in 2020.
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Despite this, "Saturday Night Live" continues to sell him as a digestible entity, poking fun at his peccadilloes. It's irresponsible. I'll offer up Charlie Chaplin in 4 "The Great Dictator" as a cautionary tale to consider.
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While Alec Baldwin is obviously an A-list talent, his take on Trump was clown makeup and a campy wig. But the real Trump is a man who used Veterans Day to dog whistle the alt-right and 4 echo Nazi language.
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On a near-weekly basis, the SNL team is 2 breathing life into a monster. Perhaps we should ask Dr. Frankenstein how that worked out for him.
1. Ad hominem • The author attacks Trump's character, calling him "a traitor, cut from the same cloth as Jefferson Davis and Julius Rosenberg." While these comparisons evoke emotional reactions, they do not constitute logical arguments against Trump's policies or actions.
2. Appeal to emotion • Much of the text uses emotionally charged language, like calling Trump "a clear-and-present danger to our way of life" and saying that SNL's skits about him are "breathing life into a monster." This language provokes an emotional rather than a logical response.
3. Anecdotal reasoning • The author cites a small number of personal conversations with students as evidence of Trump's widespread dangerous appeal. A few students' opinions do not constitute robust evidence.
4. False analogy • The author compares Trump to film villains and Nazis. These comparisons equate Trump's rhetoric and policies to genocide and extreme villainy, ignoring the relevant and significant disanalogies between Trump and Hitler or supervillains in movies, such as Trump not having directly ordered the executions of 6 million people based on their race.
5. Slippery slope • The author argues that if Trump were to regain office in 2024, he would "100% 'fight like hell' to remain there in perpetuity." This is a slippery slope fallacy, as Trump's effort to secure a second term from the 2020 election does not automatically mean he would try to remain president indefinitely, and the author provides no further evidence of such a prediction.
References
- Brian Hubba (2024, Jan 22). Why SNL's newest Trump impression isn't doing teachers like me any favors.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/snl-trump-impression-18518107.php
Disclaimer
Note that there being one or more apparent fallacies in the arguments presented in this article does not mean that every argument the arguer made was fallacious, nor does it mean there are not other arguments in existence for the same or similar position that are logically valid. Also note that checking for fallacies is not the same as verification of the premises the arguer starts from, such as facts that the arguer asserts or principles that the arguer assumes as the foundation for constructing arguments. For more about this, see our 'What is Fallacy Checking?'
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