Keeping up with national politics this year hasn’t been easy. Even amid a government shutdown, so much is happening in Washington, at such a rapid clip and such a high pitch, that a browser of The New York Times’ homepage could be forgiven for giving up and clicking straight through to Spelling Bee. But what if keeping up is your job? What if you are, say, a comedy writer tasked with translating the week’s headlines into fodder for a 90-minute live variety show? Saturday Night Live seems to have found its solution: Dump it all into the cold open.
This week’s news cycle encompassed a seeming rebuke of Donald Trump at the ballot box, massive flight cancellations three weeks before Thanksgiving, and the expiration of food-stamp benefits nationwide. And then on Thursday, after most of the show had been written, a man collapsed in the Oval Office, generating an instantly meme-able photograph of the president staring into the camera, looking oblivious to efforts to revive the prone victim at stage left.
All of these moments had already been picked over by social-media commentators and daily talk shows, making it even more difficult for the 50-year-old weekly show to figure out what micro scandal to lampoon on TV comedy’s biggest stage. So the weeks have gone at Saturday Night Live since Trump returned to the White House in January. Fortunately, the program has its ace in the hole: the uncanny Trump impersonator James Austin Johnson.
This week, the Oval Office fainting incident launched a cold open typical of SNL’s Trump 2.0 era—a survey of recent happenings that included not only the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral election and the Supreme Court’s late-breaking ruling on SNAP funding but also the continuing shutdown, rising grocery prices, and the demolition of the White House’s East Wing. “Each week, I like to create a big visual that sort of sums up how things are going,” Johnson as Trump said as he stepped out of the scene and into the spotlight. He could’ve been describing any number of recent openers too.
During a flood-the-zone presidency, this seems like a sound strategy. Any one of the topics covered in Johnson’s monologue could’ve been fodder for a stand-alone sketch. Instead, the shotgun approach keeps SNL plugged into the political conversation in a way that suits a politician with zero chill or focus. Handling headlines in bulk ensures that Johnson’s Trump, unlike the real one, can monopolize our attention for only so long.
It’s an ideal convergence of form, content, and performer. Before he was recruited by SNL, Johnson popularized his Trump impression during the coronavirus pandemic; in a series of discursive rants, he wound through such unpresidential topics as the Pokémon franchise’s ever-expanding roster of catchable creatures and the ineffectual detective skills of a cartoon dog. (“Scooby-Doo, he doesn’t do.”) The solo-act effect of these cold opens was already baked into Johnson’s videos on X and Instagram; with the lockdowns ruling out live performances, he could do the bit on his own, based on a public figure who’s something of a solo act himself.
Johnson hasn’t just mastered the president’s voice and mannerisms; he has replicated the president’s signature way of drawing audiences down twisting paths of logic through thickets of mispronunciations and dropped articles. The hallmarks of his most viral early videos are still there, wryly fused to matters of national and international import: a Ratatouille reference tacked onto an account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s quick exit from the Oval Office; a vague threat to steal not only Thanksgiving but also Christmas, a.k.a. “doing Grinch.” Johnson is uniquely positioned to race through the most pressing current events in the most humorous fashion, so that the show can satisfy the “can’t wait to see SNL’s take on this” crowd right at 11:30 Eastern, and then ease up on the politics until “Weekend Update” rolls around.
This isn’t to say that the rest of the episode, which was hosted by the roast comedian Nikki Glaser, laid off the topical punch lines entirely: An absurdist travelogue about two bachelorette-party guests on a runaway mechanical bull still made room for a crack about drone strikes against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. But such mentions (including those on “Weekend Update”) were quick hits, easily drowned out by pop-culture jokes and the like.
The opening sketch has long been the primary venue for the show’s most enduring political satire. It’s the slot where Will Ferrell, playing George W. Bush, summed up his first presidential bid in the word “strategery,” and where Tina Fey as Sarah Palin said “I can see Russia from my house!” But SNL can’t satirize this administration with a single catchphrase. Trump’s second term calls for an approach as overwhelming as the noise blasting from the White House every day. Johnson is the right man for that job. Sketches such as last night’s Oval Office monologue compact the coal of the administration’s info dumps into little diamonds of comedy, freeing the writers and cast to pursue more escapist fare.
