Clearly relishing his time away from the Weekend Update desk, Colin Jost has turned a “hey, doesn’t Jost sort of look like a white supremacist” jokes into a franchise. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (we’re going all MapQuest and refusing the White House’s new nomenclature), Jost has given poor James Austin Johnson’s Trump a top-of-SNL break by anchoring frequent cold opens as his barely exaggerated version of the booze-swilling, culture-warring, history whitewashing accused rapist. On Saturday’s Shane Gillis-hosted sub-mediocre episode, Jost’s Hegseth braved hooch-related seasickness, addressing/berating the dutifully assembled sailors of the long-deployed USS Abraham Lincoln.
Coming out in a Fireball nippy bottle bandolier and brandishing the gung-ho charisma of a divorced dad forced to coach girls’ soccer, Jost’s Hegseth scolded the seamen (“No homo,” he reflexively interjects) about their many complaints. Like the ones over their aircraft carrier’s deserved reputation for terrible food, inadequate sanitation (Kam Patterson’s pee-bloated sailor looks like Violet Beauregarde), and the documented fact that the ship’s record-breaking deployment saw some eight service people attempt to end their own lives at sea.
Obviously pissed at having to add a disdainful “…and women” to his initial greeting of the skeptical troops, Jost’s blustering Hegseth congratulated the sailors on their long-overdue return to San Diego, “which the president just asked Iran to blow up.” He also mocked those claiming that his boss new DOD action flag looks creepily Nazi-adjacent, berating Andrew Dismukes’ seaman by claiming the new logo is merely “an American eagle with a Nazi vibe.” He also touts the U.S. for entering into the public execution bloodlust arena (alongside North Korea, Iran and Afghanistan) by promising that if convicted Fort Hood killer (and convenient non-white guy with “foreign” sounding name) Nidal Hasan somehow survives his December firing squad, “he’ll have to fight Jake Paul.”
Tossing the briefing over to James Austin Johnson’s suitably raspy Robert F. Kennedy Jr after touting the fact that public show-executions are back (“Like Scrubs!”), the notably science-hating RFK (in JAJ’s recycled “buff Trump” forearms) assured the weary sailors that he’s on the case. You know, by testing out suspect mystery meat on them, as chronicled in Instagram photos of the grey slabs of slop they were routinely served while serving 322 straight days in service of Donald Trump’s latest illegal war. Thankfully, as JAJ’s RFK garbles out, while meat recalls and “cold and flu and listeria and trench-brain season” might plague the U.S. on his watch, “catfish, cricket and pony” remain viable proteins for our brave seamen, and women.
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