I honestly can’t tell you the last time I watched “Saturday Night Live.” As a kid in the '90s, it was a weekly ritual. And then it just stopped being funny. The only thing worse than a skit show that isn’t funny is a skit show that isn’t funny and that is blatantly partisan in how it handles politics. And you don’t have to watch SNL to know that it has been rabidly anti-conservative for a long time now. When they do something particularly awful, you hear about it on social media.
Eight years ago, SNL reacted to Donald Trump’s victory with Kate McKinnon portraying Hillary Clinton singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
This cold open made waves for being a major departure for the show, as it set a somber, mournful tone without even trying to be funny.
After Trump’s victory on Tuesday, I decided I’d have to see how SNL was going to handle Trump’s latest victory.
Of course, it was a heavy-handed attempt to mock Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, devoted to partisan fear-mongering far more than actual humor. Right off the bat, you knew it was going to be bad. The cold open began with four cast members standing somberly in a row, looking like they were at a funeral. It was clear at this moment that this was going to be worse than the Kate McKinnon skit eight years earlier.
The cast—and I have no idea what their names are, so pardon my vagueness—sets the tone by framing Trump’s win as “shocking and even horrifying,” clearly not even considering the fact that they may still have viewers who are happy with the election results. And considering the huge swing to Trump in 2024 over 2020, they may still, even if it's only a few. Instead, we got left-wing talking points falsely claiming Trump "tried to forcibly overturn the results of the last election" and Trump "openly called for vengeance against his political enemies," and warning that thanks to the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, “there are no guardrails” to “protect the people who are brave enough to speak out against him.”
From there, the cast, pretending to be worried that Trump is going to target his political enemies—conveniently forgetting that it was Joe Biden who did that—devolved into a caricature of sycophantic Trump supporters and competed to outdo the others in their exaggerated praise of Trump.
This wasn’t clever satire; it was a prolonged diatribe against Trump and his supporters, with every line underscoring SNL’s belief that a Trump presidency is terrifying. For instance, the characters sarcastically pledge that they’d “rat out” anyone who voted for Kamala Harris and cynically declare “Hail Trump,” as though anyone who supports him is somehow dangerous or extremist.
At least now I won't have to watch it again.
If you want to waste five minutes of your life watching the cold open, feel free to watch it below.
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