Whether or not you’re ready to hear it, Saturday Night Live has jokes about this past century-long week in political news.
Cecily Strong is the expected highlight in a cold open that visits Fox News host Jeanine Pirro’s political talk show. The lineup of topics is pretty much what you’d expect if you’ve been following the news of the past seven days: The Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, Joe Biden’s colonoscopy, and Kevin McCarthy’s eight-plus hour rant on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
There’s also an extended segment with James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump impression. In what looks like it’s going to be a recurring schtick, Johnson-as-Trump sits down and rambles incoherently on a series of semi-related (or totally unrelated, even) topics while he moves through a list of keywords as a 60-second clock ticks down. If you’ve ever watched ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, the segment is basically that but with more pronounced bouts of racism than even pro sports can normally pull off.
In Johnson, SNL seems to have cracked the Donald Trump code: While Alec Baldwin played the disgraced U.S. president again and again as a vaguely lovable idiot, Johnson’s impression (and his pitch-perfect vocal inflections) captures the real measure of the man: An addled blowhard who speaks more than he actually understands, and who wields his sweeping ignorance like it’s some kind of superpower.
