In the months since Saturday Night Live wrapped its 50th season on NBC in May, CBS had its primary late night show cancelled and ABC had its own put on a week-long hiatus. Both of these are widely assumed to be because of their hosts’ (Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, respectively) criticisms of President of the United States Donald Trump. (There really isn’t even room for guesswork about whether the government was involved with Kimmel’s case, but we digress.) Given that SNL has mocked Trump basically as long as he’s been a public figure, it was going to be a source of interest to see how the show reacted to this current paradigm.
The answer—as it has been for much of Trump 2.0—was to get meta. The season 51 premiere opened with Colin Jost as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (sure) lecturing the generals at Quantico about being less fat and gay, much like the real Hegseth did this week. After a couple minutes of this, James Austin Johnson’s Trump interrupts to declare late-night TV to be the greatest threat to democracy currently facing our country. Trump makes some jabs about keeping an eye on the show to make sure it’s not too mean to him and at Jost for not being at the Riyadh Comedy Festival (he wasn’t invited, he mumbles from his frozen tableau). Mikey Day shows up as a dancing FCC head Brendan Carr, Trump asks ICE to keep an eye on cast member Marcello Hernandez and promises to keep scamming people, and then it’s live from New York.
The real Trump hasn’t acknowledged the sketch as of this writing. (This morning, he posted on Truth Social, “It will be a big day with the Navy” and then, an hour later, he was railing against Fox News for being too “politically correct!”) While SNL has really leaned into this kind of fourth-wall-breaking set up for much of the second Trump administration, they don’t seem to have bothered him as much as Alec Baldwin’s impersonation did the first time around. In 2019, he threatened SNL and other late night shows with a FCC investigation. He’s really committed to that strategy this time around, even if, so far, “hit both sides equally” Jimmy Fallon has gotten strangely more heat.
