SNL’s Kamala Harris skit has Trump fans furious. It’s easy to see why.

If the audience erupted into applause when Kamala Harris appeared Saturday Night Live this weekend was surprised by her appearance, they could have been the only ones. The moment when Air Force Two changed course in the air to go to New York instead of Detroit, the dart was up. Lorne Michaels had said before SNLthe season started with the presidential candidates not appearing on the show for fear of running afoul of the Federal Communications Commission’s equal-time regulations, but the chance to grab the national spotlight must have been more than he could resist. And if it gave the vice president a few moments of uncritical admiration in the final weekend of the campaign, so much the better.

Michaels has long touted the show’s neutrality on election issues, and the past month’s political skits have made plays to bipartisanship. But the jabs at Harris have been loving or toothless or both, either poking fun at her linguistic tricks or half-heartedly recycling right-wing attack lines, while the portrayal of Trump has been, if not exactly vicious, at least completely devoid of empathy, condemned James Austin Johnson’s Trump to endlessly wander the podium while Maya Rudolph’s Harris kicks her heels off the campaign trail. Weekend update‘s Colin Jost merely formalized an already obvious slant when he joked that the election would “decide whether the next president is Kamala Harris or whether everyone at SNL will be revised.”

SNL‘s attempts to rise to the political moment have often been abysmal — remember Kate McKinnon’s “Hallelujah”? And its celebrities often unfold into obsequiousness. But Rudolph’s showdown with the real Harris, staged as if they were seeing each other in a dressing room mirror, managed to strike a valuable balance between parody and poignancy. When Rudolph’s Harris wished there was someone like-minded she could talk to, “a black South Asian woman running for president, preferably from the Bay Area,” the joke was in the specifics, but it was also a reminder of how rare a figure in American politics, the real Harris is—so much so that only her comic doppelganger can understand what she’s been through.

There’s a built-in shock to having public figures confront their impersonators, the kind of expectant hush that falls over a classroom when the teacher turns unexpectedly to catch a kid pulling faces behind their backs. But Harris seemed too happy to lodge even the mildest of complaints, except in the form of a question: “I don’t really laugh like that, do I?” At a Trump campaign stop the following day, Marco Rubio joked that Harris’ unbridled laughter was “probably worth 2 to 3 million votes right there.” But while Republicans have tried to make an issue of Harris’ laugh, what Saturday Night LiveThe cameras caught not a creepy laugh, but a beaming smile, fueled by a solid 30 seconds of rapturous applause, as if a woman who has addressed a stadium-sized audience was overwhelmed by a few hundred. In a day or a week, the moment might feel like the last hum of hopium, a group of blue-state elites clapping for their own righteousness. But with the polls swinging emotions in every imaginable direction and both sides acting like they’re losing, it was a relief to see a candidate act as if the race might actually produce something good, if only in within a few minutes.

SNLMeanwhile, Trump was by his own token “running on fumes,” associating freely in front of a passive audience on stage while clearly wishing he could be somewhere else. And while the real Trump campaign requested and got their equal time, the minute-long message Trump recorded for NBC to broadcast Sunday was correspondingly low energy. It felt like it was him, and not the network, that was forced to comply. Trump has always fed his crowds, but in recent weeks he has shown signs of turning them on, complaints about broken microphones and looks more drained than energetic. If only he had someone to talk to to.