Washington: Judging by the reaction to a Saturday Night Live writer’s tweet over the weekend, one norm of US politics remains unshakeable: The children of presidents should be off limits.
It is a rule that has been cited — and sometimes broken — through a succession of first daughters. Now for the first time in more than half a century, the president has a young son.
Shortly after President Donald Trump took the oath of office Friday, a comedy writer for SNL, Katie Rich, tweeted what was intended to be a joke about Barron Trump and school shootings, prompting a barrage of criticism. Within a few hours, Rich deleted the tweet and locked down her Twitter account, but it remained a topic on social media all weekend.
By Monday afternoon, it was announced that Rich had been suspended indefinitely. She posted an apology on her Twitter account, which was again made public.
“I sincerely apologise for the insensitive tweet. I deeply regret my actions & offensive words. It was inexcusable & I’m so sorry,” Rich tweeted.
One of the most prominent reactions to the controversy came Sunday from a former first daughter, Chelsea Clinton, who wrote a Facebook post imploring that Barron, who is 10, be left alone.
“Barron Trump deserves the chance every child does — to be a kid,” Clinton wrote, in a post that received more than 105,000 reactions and was shared close to 9,000 times, as others recirculated her message on their own feeds.
“Standing up for every kid also means opposing POTUS policies that hurt kids,” Clinton added.
Commenters agreed. A typical reply: “Many did not give the same respect to the Obama children, which made me so sad. I will give respect to Barron because he deserves it no matter what his father does.”
It was a rare point of agreement across the political spectrum on social media over a weekend during which hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets to protest the new administration.
Trump supporters were particularly upset. Multiple online petitions called on NBC to fire Rich and had amassed more than 80,000 signatures by Monday morning. Donald Trump has been quick to criticise SNL in the past, but this time he and the White House made no comment.
Although Barron Trump will be in New York for at least several more months to finish his school year, he would be the first young boy in the White House since John F. Kennedy Jr. John-John, as he was known then, and his older sister, Caroline, a toddler, were treated gently, and one of his most famous moments was when he was photographed playing under his father’s desk.
That sort of warm public moment is more typical of White House children, often witnessed with delight by a president’s supporters. Barron himself drew positive attention Friday when he was caught on video playing peek-a-boo with his nephew after the ceremony.
The darker side of being a White House child seems to have begun in the 1970s, during the early days of Saturday Night Live, which mocked Amy Carter, then 9, in a skit. According to the book White House Kids, Carter was portrayed as spoiled beyond all reason, complaining to her father, “It’s always United States ‘first’ and Amy ‘second!’”
During her father’s campaign, Chelsea Clinton was also satirised on the show, and at the age of 12, while she was living in the White House, her looks were mocked by conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh.
The Bush twins, Jenna and Barbara, were 19 when George W. Bush was elected, but they too inspired late-night comedy for some of their behaviour in college. And in 2014, Elizabeth Lauten, a spokeswoman for a Tennessee congressman, apologised and resigned after criticising Malia and Sasha Obama on Facebook.
The era of social media has only cranked up the volume. It has also added new risks for comedy writers used to trying out their material with followers.
Rich, who got her start in improv and began writing for Saturday Night Live in 2013, described her SNL job in a 2015 interview with the Chicago Tribune, saying that she worked on about 200 jokes a week, a tiny fraction of which made it onto the show. She said she preferred working in the anonymity of the writer’s room to subjecting herself to the spotlight as a woman.
“No random blogger’s like, ‘She got fat,’ or ‘She sucked in that,’” she said. “Nobody really knows who you are, but you’re still a part of it all.”
