Joe Biden portrayed as senile in Kamala Harris’s SNL skit

Comedy show’s savage portrayal of the president will be seen as an attempt by the vice-president to further distance herself from her boss

Kamala Harris made a last-ditch appeal to voters by appearing in a Saturday Night Live sketch which depicted Joe Biden as senile.
The comedy show’s savage portrayal of Mr Biden will be seen as an attempt by Ms Harris to further distance herself from her boss.
In the “cold opening” segment the president was depicted as confused with the actor portraying him speaking in nonsensical sound bites.
Maya Rudolph who has played Ms Harris on this season of SNL widened her eyes when the Biden character suggested he would speak to reporters.
Mr Biden caused a headache for the Harris campaign this week when he appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage”.
While she publicly remains loyal to the president, Ms Harris has increasingly insisted that her administration would be different from the one in which she has served for four years.
With polling day fast approaching, the vice-president has shied away from doing joint appearances with Mr Biden.
One source told the New York Times that her campaign believes that appearing with Mr Biden “would only hurt her”.
It has left Mr Biden to arrange his own campaign events, largely focusing on union members – appealing to the blue-collar cohort of workers where polls suggest she is struggling.
While Ms Harris has appeared at massive rallies alongside stars like Beyoncé, Mr Biden’s get-the-vote-out appearances have been low-key affairs.
On the campaign trail Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that Mr Biden was the victim of a coup and that the president resents how he was manoeuvred off the Democrat ticket.
The Saturday Night Live sketch, in which Ms Harris appeared opposite Rudolph, has drawn comparisons to a segment starring Jimmy Fallon in 2015 which featured two Donald Trumps.
Both the SNL and Fallon skits featured the real and mock politicians staring at each other through a mirror.
Ms Harris used the primetime appearance to poke fun at Trump, days after a viral video showed him struggling to climb into a garbage truck in Wisconsin while wearing an orange fluorescent safety vest.
In a pep talk to Rudolph, Ms Harris said: “I am just here to remind you that you have got this. You can do something your opponent cannot do, like open doors.”
The Trump campaign was unimpressed by Saturday night’s sketch.
“Kamala Harris has nothing substantive to offer the American people, so that’s why she’s living out her warped fantasy cosplaying with her elitist friends on Saturday Night Leftists as her campaign spirals down the drain into obscurity,” said campaign spokesman Steven Cheung.
“For the last four years, Kamala’s destructive policies have led to untold misery and hurt for all Americans. She broke it, and President Trump will fix it.”
Ms Harris’s appearance on Saturday Night Live violated broadcasting rules, a Trump appointee at a television watchdog has claimed.
The show which has an audience of around five million breached an “equal time rule”, according to Brendan Carr from the Federal Communications Commission.
“This is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule,” he said, adding that the rule was designed to avoid “this type of biased and partisan conduct”.
The rule grants candidates the right to request equal air time.