Saturday Night Live mocked President Trump’s deportation campaign, his often fawning cabinet members, and his obsession with winning prizes and awards in its latest cold open sketch.
In the skit, Trump was hosting The Trumps, a media awards show where he was also nominated for multiple categories, a bizarro world version of the real awards circuit, where Trump recently hosted the Kennedy Center honors at the flagship arts institution he recently renamed after himself.
“It truly is an honor to be here hosting The Trumps after that lady whose name I already forgot gave me her Nobel Prize,” the president, played by James Austin Johnson, said, flanked by gold Trump statues. “I thought I needed more awards. And after what all my little freaks and psychos at ICE have been doing, I need more distractions. Look, everything’s gold and shiny.”
“My doctors say if I clap both my dead purple hands will explode with blood,” he added, a reference to the president’s frequently bruised hands. “It’s probably nothing to worry about.”
The first award was for best picture — of Trump.
The nominees were the president’s odd photo hugging the American flag at CPAC last year, his appearance in the Epstein files, an image taken of Trump staring blankly ahead as a man collapsed from a medical issue in the White House in November, and the spectacle of Trump winning a newly created FIFA peace prize, which was announced after the real Trump had just lost out on his long-sought attempt to win a Nobel.
When Trump won the award, he told the crowd, “I love me! I really love me!” a reference to Sally Field’s famous 1985 Best Actress speech.
When Argentinian president Javier Milei, played by Marcello Hernández, was speaking onstage about the best foreign film category (winner “nada”), Trump rushed the stage and claimed, “I’m taking this award, I’m taking Greenland, and I’m taking Zootopia,” a fictional realm from a Disney movie.
Soon after, once “legend of horror” and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller got through onstage, Trump was back, this time to interrupt DHS Secretary Kristi Noem as she accepted the best kiss award for “Trump’s ass.”
Trump again leapt into the spotlight, this time thanking his “long-time agent,” the Norse god of mischief and trickery Loki.
The sketch concluded with Mike Myers reprising his role as Elon Musk to present a comedy achievement award, plus a duet between fictional versions of country star Carrie Underwood and a member of the Village People. The song honored all the things Trump destroyed over the last year, which the sketch named as the White House East Wing, DEI, civil rights, constitutional checks and balances, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The skit was a play on the president’s well-known love of pomp and circumstance, as well as his long-running, thus far fruitless, public campaign for a Nobel Prize.
Earlier this week, a leaked message from Trump linked his campaign to take over Greenland to his frustration over not getting a Nobel.
The president warned that he “no longer feels an obligation to think purely of peace” after he didn’t get the prize, which instead went to Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who ended up symbolically giving it to Trump during a White House visit earlier this month.
Neither the sketch nor the opening monologue by host Teyana Taylor specifically mentioned the fatal Saturday morning shooting that took place in Minneapolis, in which Border Patrol agents killed U.S. citizen Alex Pretti.
Last week, SNL cut a sketch mocking immigration agents from cast member and Minnesota native Tommy Brennan, blaming time constraints.
