After confessing to Jimmy Fallon earlier this week that Lorne Michaels had to perform his “Jedi Mind Trick thing” to get him back in Studio 8H to revive his tired and shoddy Donald Trump impression, Alec Baldwin was back again on Saturday Night Live.
This week opened with a spoof of Trump’s rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico—”by far my favorite Mexico”—which over the weekend joined a growing list of cities to send the president’s campaign a bill for unpaid costs incurred during his visit, which took place last month.
After mocking Trump’s statement last week in which he bragged about building a wall in Colorado to protect the state from immigrants—even though Colorado doesn’t share a border with Mexico—he led supporters in a chant. “There was no collusion!” they cheered, before being corrected by Baldwin’s Trump: Not that one, the new one. “No quid pro quo!” they obliged.
A rotating cast of supporters then joined him at the podium. First a woman played by Cecily Strong wearing a T-shirt reading “Keem Amarica Greab Agrain,” which she tells him “was taken verbatim from one of your tweets,” and then a conspiracy theorist played by Aidy Bryant showed up, shouting, “The earth is coming for us! Beyoncé is white!”
Pete Davidson showed up as what seemed to be a young Trump supporter, later revealed to be a freed member of ISIS. “I want to thank you for bringing jobs back... to ISIS,” he says to Trump. “I promise to make ISIS great again.”
Kate McKinnon’s Lindsey Graham was there, as was Alex Moffat’s Mark Zuckerberg. “He got his ass owned by AOC, which means he’s one of us now,” Baldwin’s Trump says, telling Zuck, “I want to thank Facebook for running our Russian campaign for us.”
The highlight for the studio audience, gauging by the applause of the crowd, was Darrell Hammond’s return as Bill Clinton, itself a needed master class in how to keep a presidential impression fresh after many years, given who he was standing next to.
When Baldwin’s Trump tells Hammond’s Clinton that he’s getting impeached, Clinton’s eyes deviously narrow. “You dirty dog…” he teases, before Trump interrupts: “It’s not for that. They don’t mind when I do that. Trust me.”
The final guest was Fred Armisen surprising as Turkey’s President Erdogan, who reassured Trump that “we’re treating the Kurds really well.” When Trump informs him that some generals—“or vagernals, as I call them, are mad that we pulled out of Syria”—Erdogan quips, “Usually people are mad when you don’t pull out!”
With that, live from New York, it was Saturday Night.
(Meanwhile, earlier this week on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, of all series, possibly one of the best Trump impressions on any comedy show yet aired. It was as part of the “Snatch Game” episode, in which the show’s drag queen contestants do celebrity impressions in a spoof of the classic game show, Match Game, performed by British drag performer The Vivienne. There’s only a brief clip of it online, but trust that it was brilliant—and certainly superior to this.)
