• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, November 3, 2015

With this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” now just days away, it appears that all the protests lodged in the last few weeks over Donald Trump’s scheduled appearance as the show’s guest host have come to naught. 

Sorry, petitioners -- at this late juncture, it’s hard to envision a scenario in which NBC pulls the plug on the Trumpster, since preparing for “SNL” is nothing if not labor-intensive. I suspect all the Donald-related sketches, monologue jokes and “Weekend Update” items have been written and are now deep in the thick of pre-production.

And as NBC well knows (and the Donald does too), the show will get great ratings, followed by huge Web traffic in the days that follow as the video of Trump’s sketches gets replayed on YouTube and a hundred other platforms.

For years now, this has been one of the secrets of “SNL’s” success: Not only is it the only “new” show on a typical Saturday night that anyone talks about after it airs (except for all the weekends when it’s in repeats), but with so little content emanating from anywhere else on Sunday morning, hundreds of Web sites recap the show and embed the videos. It’s almost as if “SNL” has a Sunday-morning Web monopoly when it comes to entertainment “news.”

Chalk one up for showmanship: With so much potential viewership, Web traffic and ad money on the line, NBC is saying to heck with its integrity and letting the show go on. My own opinion -- as stated yesterday in another blog post about protest-petitions -- is that TV networks shouldn’t knuckle under to protest movements.

On the other hand, it would also be accurate to charge NBC with hypocrisy since the company was so adamant about its aversion to Trump last June when he announced his candidacy for presidency and declared that many Mexican immigrants are rapists.

At the risk of repeating myself, since I included NBC’s June statement on Trump in another recent blog post about him, here’s what NBC said then: “At NBC, respect and dignity for all people are cornerstones of our values. Due to the recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants, NBCUniversal is ending its business relationship with Mr. Trump.” 

Well, that didn’t last long, did it? Various protesters have been up in arms ever since NBC announced on Oct. 13 that Trump would guest-host “SNL” on Nov. 7. Just yesterday, a group of 26 Hispanic congressmen and congresswomen issued a statement demanding that NBC “disinvite” Trump from the show. 

After listing the various ways that Trump and his campaign have positioned the immigration issue in a manner unfavorable to Hispanics, the statement concludes: “Be it resolved that the Congressional Hispanic Caucus calls upon NBCUniversal … and SNL Executive Producer Lorne Michaels to disinvite Mr. Trump from hosting Saturday Night Live because racism is not funny; and be it further resolved, that the Congressional Hispanic Caucus urges NBCUniversal to stand by its earlier commitment to end its relationship with Mr. Trump because the values of ‘respect and dignity for all people’ are more important than ratings and ad revenues.” 

On Tuesday morning, an NBC/“SNL” press rep said the network is “not commenting” on the Hispanic Caucus’s demands.

My gut instinct on this one (instincts that are often wrong, by the way) tells me that if NBC intended to “disinvite” Trump from “SNL,” it would have done so weeks ago. So for now, barring some last-minute miracle or other unforeseen turn of events, we can assume that the Trump show will go on.

“Saturday Night Live” with Donald Trump as guest-host airs this Saturday (Nov. 7) at 11:30 p.m. Eastern (with musical guest Sia).