Donald Trump won the election. Now what?
Saturday Night Live brought back Alec Baldwin — who sat out the episode immediately following November 8 — to open the show with that increasingly alarming question, after 10 days of Trump’s transition team slowly assembling itself like Optimus Prime, if Optimus Prime were comprised of questionable ethics instead of old cars.
As his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway (played by Kate McKinnon) flits about in the doorway ushering in eager well-wishers, Baldwin’s Trump gets more and more anxious about the idea of actually, you know, governing.
“When we heard you had a secret plan [to defeat ISIS], it really energized us,” a general tells him, to Trump’s alarm.
“You came and said you were going to bring every single job back to our town!” a West Virginian coal advocate cries, making Trump’s jaw drop even further in horror when he adds, “Hell, if you could build a wall that’s two thousand miles on the Mexican border, I’m sure you could help us!”
“That’s two thousand American miles?” Trump responds, gulping.
At one point, Jason Sudeikis returns as Mitt Romney to shake Trump’s hand for a solid 30 seconds, until they both admit “this isn’t gonna work” and he exits stage left.
At the height of his panic, Beck Bennett’s Mike Pence strolls in, fresh off getting “a free lecture” from the cast of Hamilton. As he goes down a checklist of things he and Trump said they would do — deport millions of undocumented immigrants, repeal and replace Obamacare, put Hillary Clinton in jail — Baldwin’s Trump decides this all sounds pretty hard, so, “scrap it.”
But it’s with Pence that Trump finds his first bit of comfort in this cold open. “You’re going to do everything, right?” Trump asks him urgently, to which Bennett’s Pence immediately responds, “Yes, sir.”
SNL has one more show before it’s off for the year, as Emma Stone returns to host on December 3, meaning there’s one more show before President-elect Trump takes office. That leaves plenty of time for fresh new scandals and conflicts to arise for their satirizing pleasure — but SNL has at least one viewer who isn’t looking forward to it.
I watched parts of @nbcsnl Saturday Night Live last night. It is a totally one-sided, biased show - nothing funny at all. Equal time for us?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2016
