‘Saturday Night Live’ cast fires shots at Donald Trump cabinet selections
As expected, the fallout from the presidential elections continues to dominate both the cultural discourse and the Saturday Night Live writers’ room, with the long-running sketch comedy taking aim at the cabinet selections made by a victorious Donald Trump.
The Home Alone 2 star and WWE Hall of Famer will return to the White House after sweeping to victory in an election that took many by surprise due to its unexpectedly one-sided nature, and the SNL creative team will have plenty of material coming their way over the course of the next four years.
Wasting little time in firing shots across the bows, the headline-grabbing appointments of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to headline a legitimate government agency operating under the acronym ‘DOGE’, the elevation of former sex trafficking investigation subject Matt Gaetz to the position of attorney general, and proponent of raw milk, denier of vaccine effectiveness, conspiracy theorist, and parasitic brain worm host Robert F Kennedy to the role of health secretary were all placed under the spotlight.
The SNL cold open featured James Austin Johnson and Dana Carvey returning as Trump and current incumbent Joe Biden, respectively, reflecting on the picks. “I am very vastly picking the most epic cabinet of all time,” Johnson’s Trump explained. “They are some of the most dynamic, free-thinking, animal-killing, sexually criminal, medically crazy people in the country.”
Johnson’s Trump then referred to Musk and Gaetz as “alien vs predator,” before Alec Baldwin returned under his latest guise, adding RFK Jr to his list of SNL characters. Seeing an open goal, the actor mocked not only the legacy politician’s world-famous cognitive parasite, but the bizarre stories he’s been happy to regale about his inhumane behaviour towards the animal kingdom.
“Americans need someone to teach them how to be healthy, someone like me: a 70-year-old man with movie star looks and a worm in his brain,” Baldwin’s RFK Jr offered. “I care deeply about a woman’s right to choose: to choose to give her child polio. I just wish people would take my appointment more seriously. I gotta go. I got a dead dolphin in my car. I think if I saw it in half and dump it in Central Park.”
Easy targets, perhaps, but it speaks to the current complexion of politics in the United States that memes, brainworms, and people being investigated for federal crimes are all being appointed to the cabinet of a presidency that’s being overseen by a convicted felon. Sometimes, the real world is a lot stranger than fiction.
