On Saturday night, one week after ceding the late-night program to union-busting Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, SNL’s “Weekend Update” took aim at Liz Cheney, the Republican congresswoman who’s made the news (every hour of every day) for recently morphing into a #NeverTrumper following the Trump brigade’s Capitol insurrection.
While the mainstream media has held Cheney up as some sort of blue-blazered Spartacus for breaking from her party and challenging Trump’s Big Lie—which cost her a GOP party chair role—others with a memory dating back to before the events of Jan. 6 have viewed it as an eleventh-hour act of opportunism by a known bigot who voted along with Trump for much of his presidency.
“House Republicans voted to remove Liz Cheney from her party leadership role after she continued to challenge Donald Trump’s lie that the election was stolen,” cracked “Weekend Update” co-host Michael Che. “Wow, yeah, I never thought I’d find myself feeling bad for Liz Cheney—and I was right. I don’t.”
Che and his partner in crime Colin Jost then welcomed Liz Cheney in the flesh—played by the inimitable Kate McKinnon.
“I fell down to hell like Lil Nas X, fracked with the devil, and bounced back up onto MSNBC,” offered McKinnon’s Cheney. “Colin, the Republican Party is changing. I don’t know what happened! I don’t know what I did wrong. Look at me: I am everything a conservative woman is supposed to be. Blond, mean.”
“…And?” Jost asked.
“I was done,” Cheney replied.
Later in her spiel, Cheney tried to convince the skeptical co-anchors that her coalition of #NeverTrump Republicans posed a formidable challenge to the rest of the GOP, who’ve collectively bent the knee to Trump.
“It’s gonna be me, George Conway, Nancy Reagan’s… ghost, Meghan McCain—is not in, but I’m working on her… Colin, this is the grand implosion of Trumpism. You don’t even know the size of the tsunami that’s coming,” maintained Cheney, deeply unconvincingly.
Then, McKinnon’s Cheney reminded the viewers at home just how awful the person that the media is hailing as a hero really is.
“Conservatives are leaving me high and dry, and what more can I do for you people?” she proclaimed. “I opposed gay marriage even though my own sister is a lez.”
