In Honor of Saturday Night and The Apprentice, I Revisited Donald Trump's Infamous 2015 Hosting Stint
They have fun! Fun fact: hundreds of thousands of people did of COVID due to Trump’s actions, or rather inaction.
It seems safe to assume that if Lorne Michaels thought that Donald Trump had a good chance of being elected president in 2016, he would not have invited him to host the fourth episode of its forty-first season.
Conventional wisdom held that Trump was a clown and a buffoon, a patently unserious man who would be destroyed in November when Hillary Clinton scored a landslide victory over Trump and became the first female president.
Outside of the true believers, seemingly no one gave Trump much of a chance in 2016. We, as a culture, underestimated both Trump and the reactionary, racist white rage that would catapult him to the highest office in the land in violent defiance of God’s will.
Giving ninety minutes of television to a sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic wannabe Hitler wouldn’t reflect well on the show or Michaels, of course. But when Clinton scored a landslide, and Trump was laughed out of politics, lefties would forgive, if perhaps not forget, that Trump was invited onto one of history’s most legendary and influential television shows.
Alternately, it’s possible that he thought he could do what he did when Gerald Ford’s press secretary Ron Nessen hosted in what he adorably and delusionally thought would make the show go easier on his boss and embarrass the host and his administration with a particularly raunchy, lowbrow affair.
That’s not how it plays out. Hosts play a huge role in determining which sketches make it onto the air. “Part of the reason I’m here is that I know how to take a joke,” Trump claims in his monologue, but he nevertheless exclusively chose sketches that polished his image as a powerful, beloved real estate, television, and now political figure.
Trump unsurprisingly chose sketches that made him look not just good but great. The show presented Trump as he wanted to be seen—a big macher and manly winner with a great sense of humor about himself—rather than how he actually is.
Michaels knew that Trump meant ratings, so he made a Faustian bargain. He invited the devil to host and hoped that he could somehow hold onto his creative soul.
Here’s the thing: you cannot undo what has been done. At a time when the world was waking up to the dangerous nature of Trump and his movement, Michaels made The Apprentice host a shameful part of the show’s legacy. Did Saturday Night Live play a role in Trump’s surprise victory by giving him an hour and a half of prime television real estate? I don’t know. It was a close race, but I think it’s safe to say that it certainly did not hurt his campaign.
Being invited to host Saturday Night Live is an honor that Trump did not deserve.
The notorious episode opens, appropriately enough, with a political sketch that finds Rachel Maddow moderating a forum, which she defines as a political debate that no one watches. The first candidate onstage is Mike O’Malley, who represents every no-hoper ever to bore the voting public en route to Nowheresville.
The sketch captures the awkward racial politics of television news when Maddow announces that because the forum takes place in the South, there will be occasional tight close-ups of black audience members looking surprised and uncomfortable.
Then comes Hillary Clinton, who Kate McKinnon can’t help but imbue with her spry impishness. She plays the failed 2016 presidential candidate as someone who has been a politician in the public eye for so long that she’s incapable of sincerity and behaving like a human being. She’s all smiling, calculating desperation, and zero authenticity.
She’s followed by Larry David’s apoplectic take on Bernie Sanders as a hectoring crank who makes no attempt to hide his incandescent rage towards everyone but his grandchildren and the underclass.
David’s Sanders rants relatably about how he doesn’t want dollars or even fancy coins like quarters and dimes from donors; he wants the kind of gummed up, blackened, barely usable pennies and nickels even poor people throw away. He’s a man of the people who understandably hates the people. As David’s Sanders seethes of humanity, “What’s to like?”
Saturday Night Live loves to have extremely famous people who are not Ready For Prime Time Players portray extremely famous politicians. Audiences can have bonus celebrity impressions as a treat.
David’s Sanders has the honor of ending the cold open by screaming “Live from New York,” but instead of uttering the famous words countless funny people have shouted triumphantly through the decades, he kvetches, “Live from New York, eh, you get it!”
Then come the opening credits. I didn’t watch Saturday Night Live when this aired, so I only recognized about seventy-five percent of the 347 cast members, some of whom I’m pretty sure don’t actually exist. I’m fairly certain, for example, that no one named Jon Rudnitsky has ever lived, let alone been part of Saturday Night Live.
Donald Trump lumbers onstage in his classic ensemble: a shapeless, too-big suit that looks like it wrinkles if he even looks at it and a comically long red tie. Mr. Billions dresses like a hated boss in a 1950s comic strip.
The crowd roars. The band claps. It doesn’t matter that they’re clapping for a xenophobic monster of id and ego; Trump is famous. Everyone knows who he is. As he will be the first to loudly declaim, Trump means big ratings. That’s why he’s onstage. That’s why he’s on the show.
“It’s wonderful to be here. I will tell you, this is going to be something special. Many of the greats have hosted, as you know.” Trump stutters as he gazes intensely at cue cards and makes those weird gestures with his hands that make it look like he’s playing an invisible accordion.
Then comes the first brag. “Like me, in 2004!”
That Donald sure has an ego on him!
“A lot of people are saying you’re the most amazing guy. You’re brilliant. You’re handsome, you’re rich. You have everything going for you. The world is waiting for you to be president. So why are you hosting Saturday Night Live? Why?” Trump roars. He’s in his comfort zone, boasting about his greatness on national television in front of an indulgent audience.
Then comes the kinda, sorta, non-punchline, “and the answer is, I really have nothing better to do.”
“People think I’m controversial, but the truth is I’m a nice guy. I don’t hold grudges against anybody like Rosie O’Donnell. She said some things about me that were hurtful and untrue. I said some things about her that were mean but completely accurate. The fact is that when I showed up for rehearsal, Rosie was here to support me. Come on out, Rosie.” Trump blares while continuing to play his invisible Squeezebox.
He then brings out the delightful Aidy Briant, who tells Trump that she’s a cast member on the show.
“Isn’t she great? She just seems like a really totally different person.” Trump gushes, the joke being that Trump can’t tell the difference between two overweight women.
In words chockablock with historical irony, Trump boasts, “Part of the reason I’m here is that I know how to take a joke.”
He proved that by going on to rant incoherently about Saturday Night Live being a low-rated failure and the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party every time they had the audacity to run sketches poking fun at the then-president.
“They’ve done so much to ridicule me over the years, this show has been a disaster for me. Look at this guy.”
Taran Killam then comes out in costume as Trump and bloviates in character briefly alongside the man he’s impersonating.
Saturday Night Live is fond of having real celebrities confront their sketch comedy doppelgangers or having impersonators share the stage with the people they’re impersonating.
Audiences love seeing super-famous celebrities pop up unexpectedly. They just plain love seeing super-famous people, yet this slick convention rings hollow by underlining the fundamental toothless nature of the impressions and the satire. Celebrities may pretend to be offended, but by showing up, they’re happily cosigning and approving the show’s generally very soft take on them.
Then comes Darrell Hammond in a baggy suit and long red tie to do an even more flattering impression of the man.
“They’re great. They don’t have my talent, my money, or especially my good looks. But you know what? They’re not bad, and we’ll have a lot of fun tonight!” Trump promises, squeezing a surprising amount of menace into the words “a lot of fun tonight.”
Then Larry David yells that Trump is a racist. When Trump asks what he’s doing, he says that he was told if he yelled he’d be paid five thousand dollars.
The monologue is appalling. When an objectively terrible person is hosting, like O.J. Simpson, Steven Seagal, or Donald Trump, the writers give them monologues in which they spend five minutes bragging about their awesomeness.
The audience is supposed to dislike them for coming off as arrogant and narcissistic, but Trump’s fans love the boasting. They love the arrogance. They love the narcissism. They love the ego. They love the whole grotesque grand gestalt.
There’s lots of self-aggrandizement in Trump’s monologue but no self-deprecation. Even David calling Trump a racist feeds into the absurd right-wing conviction that the left has no problem whatsoever with a man who screeches that they’re America-hating Marxist vermin poisoning our country with their bad genes and must be paid handsomely by George Soros to create the illusion that people somehow dislike Donald Trump.
We then skip ahead to a sketch set in 2018, two years into a Trump term more magnificent than even he could have anticipated.
“Halfway through your first term and prosperity is at an all time high. In two years, you really made America great again” says an aide played by Bobby Moynhian admiringly.
“Everyone loves the new laws you tweeted!” He goes on to cheer.
There’s more good news. The Trump administration has defeated ISIS and now all of the Syrian refugees have returned and are working for Trump casinos.
“How’s the situation in Russia?” Trump asks Secretary of State Omarosa. The joke is that Trump would give a reality-show villain one of the most important jobs in the government. In actuality he gave her a less important jobm then railed against her when they had a failing out.
“Never better. After your face to face meeting, Putin has withdrawn from the Ukraine and believe me, he does not want to be called a loser again. He cried for hours.”
“I don’t have to get into specifics. With me, it just magically happens.” Trump boasts.
Then the real Ivanka Trump enters the stage to applause and delight as his Secretary of the Interior. In reality he went on to give her a position as a top advisor based on her being his daughter and having a smoking hot bod.
The only problem for a Trump White House is excessive winning; his administration, and our nation as a whole, is winning so damn much that they’re getting sick of it.
“Winning all the time can be exhausting. That’s the price of being great.”
Then Trump breaks the fourth wall to boast, “If you think that’s how it’s going to be when I’m president, you’re wrong. It’s going to be even better. I said to the writers of this sketch, keep it modest. It’s better to start with low expectations; that way, you have nowhere to go but up.”
This isn’t a sketch; it’s a tongue-in-cheek campaign ad. Trump’s ego is big enough to be seen from the moon, yet Saturday Night Live felt the need to inflate it further.
I believe this was the point where my morbid curiosity ended and I turned it off when it aired originally.
The episode gets off to an abysmal start with a jokeless, laughless tribute to its host’s greatness that lovingly cradles the ball and strokes the shaft, metaphorically speaking.
Then Trump explains that he won’t be in the next sketch, which takes place in an Italian restaurant, but he will be live-tweeting insults about the cast and the sketch, lovely sentiments like “Kate McKinnon was born stupid” and “I love SNL. SNL loves me but everyone in this sketch is a stupid loser who can bite my dust.”
The humor comes from Trump tweeting insults at the cast that hurt their feelings with their cruelty. The sketch ends awkwardly and abruptly with Leslie Jones entering the scene and Trump tweeting, “I love the blacks.”
Trump’s awkward contorting, which can be seen in rallies where “YMCA” is being played triumphantly, figures prominently in a parody of the “Hotline Bling” music video, which highlights the dorkiness of Drake’s old-man dance moves.
It’s strange to see Trump move to anything but the Village People’s tribute to indiscriminate gay hookups and weirdly humanizing. It’s also the only time in the show that he’s done anything other than talk about how great he is and how much everyone else sucks.
Sia is the musical guest. I would love to know how she feels about the fact that for the rest of eternity, she will be linked to Donald Trump through this epic folly, this dreadful mistake, this cowardly act of capitulation towards a famous monster whose fame the show harnessed but whose monstrousness it doesn’t touch.
“Weekend Update” mostly goes after Trump adversaries like Obama, Ben Carson, and Jeb Bush. The hardest the anchors hit is when Michael Che says that some folks object to the ableist slur in Trump’s then-new book Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, but he objects to the “Again” part.
As a black man, he’s not eager to forego progress and return to the world of segregation and Jim Crow. It’s a relevant point made softly and succinctly. There’s no point digging into Trump’s abhorrent racism on a satirical television comedy when you can celebrate him and cater to his enormous ego.
Trump returns in one of those sketches that run late in the evening as Gene Breads, the laser harp player for a busy but undistinguished bar band. The humor comes from him playing a conspicuously short solo and being annoyed and envious that the rest of the band keeps playing longer and longer solos.
It’s a sketch that at least deserves credit for being unfunny in a markedly different way than the rest of the show. It’s unfunny weird instead of unfunny, ha-ha. Also, Trump plays someone other than himself.
Considering that Trump got into trouble for cheating on his wife with a porn star, it’s ironic that the last bit is a sketch where a pair of soft-headed former double entendres-dispensing porn stars, awkwardly sing the praises of someone they call Donald Tramp, the perfect resident for the “Oral Office.”
Larry David stands next to Trump but wisely walks in the opposite direction as quickly as possible. I can only imagine how weird and awkward it would be to be a professional, funny person in their twenties or thirties who is semi-expected to hug Donald Trump as part of their very strange job.
Lorne Michaels got what he wanted from the show ratings-wise. It wasn’t just the top-rated show of the season by a lot; it was the top-rated episode of the show since Justin Timberlake hosted the finale of its thirty-sixth season in May 2011.
A Trump-hosted Saturday Night Live episode promised boffo ratings. On that level, it delivered. Lorne Michaels’ deathless brainchild got a lot of attention and excellent ratings but at a steep cost to its soul.
The Donald Trump episode remains a dark stain on the show’s reputation. It was a grim and regrettable moment when Lorne Michaels handed the keys to the show to someone who never should have been considered a host, let alone a host smack dab in the middle of a presidential campaign that would change the world dramatically, and not for the better.
Nathan had life-changing but extremely expensive dental implants that he cannot afford, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here