Trump, Jim Jordan’s Failures & “Awful” America Lights Up ‘SNL’s Cold Open – Deadline
By Dominic Patten
Senior Editor, Legal & TV Critic
“Yo-hoo, is this the loser’s room?” asked James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live’s cold open tonight. “Don’t we love our country, what an awful place it is,” he said later in the skit, nailing the ex-real estate mogul and one of the better political cold opens SNL has had in a long time.
Crashing a one-man pity party by Mikey Day’s phone breaking Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Johnson’s ever better Trump mocked the never-was Speaker of the House for his rejection by his fellow Republicans on the NBC late-nighter Saturday. Stressing he “prefers the Jordans who win,” SNL’s Trump blew his own horn on what a great Speaker he would be, as some of the GOP wingnuts have suggested.
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“Sadly, I’ll be too busy campaigning,” Johnson mimicked the much indicted former and perhaps future POTUS “Traveling from city to city, visiting their beautiful courtrooms.”
As chaos, confusion and bloodshed continues between Israel and the Hamas-run Gaza, following the terrorist attack on the Jewish state on October 7, the Republican clown show back in DC or the court case sh*t show of the former Celebrity Apprentice host was clearly the direction SNL were going to go in tonight’s cold open. In a rare case of splitting the difference, they rightly chose to go for a bit of both – with a bit of Chloe Fineman as Rep. Lauren Boebert (R – CO) and some Radiohead karaoke.
Or as Johnson’s Trump crowed: “Oh yeah, you will be taken care of!
One of the reasons tonight SNL cold open worked so well is due to the fact that it was so self-contained. So often, even if the cold open starts strong, the skit throws in everything and the kitchen sink and becomes a mess.
Not tonight. Tonight the cold open stuck to the tried, true and Trump – – though the finesse of Day’s Jordan almost makes one wish the flamethrowing Congressman from Ohio had scored the Speakership, purely for comic value.
“Some of us are actually here to serve the American people,” lamented Day’s Jordan at the top of the skit. “All I want to do is get Congress back to work so I can shut it down again,” the Is It Cake? host added in a perfect real-life summary of the leadership ambitions of the now failed Speaker to-be.
“Do you think if one more time I try I could be elected Speaker?” Day’s perfectly coiffed Jordan asked drop-in buddy Rep George Santos (R-NY), played one again to perfection by Bowen Yang. “I would be lying if I said Yes, so Yes,” Yang’s Santos, a man currently charged for a lot more than just lying to get himself into Congress.
In its season premiere last week, host and former cast member Pete Davidson, who lost his firefighter father on 9/11, cast aside the traditional cold open to talk about the horrors unfolding in the Middle East. “Sometimes comedy is really the only way forward through tragedy,” he then told the crowd and viewers, before launching into a monologue about incest and Game of Thrones.
Now over two weeks without a Speaker for the House of Representatives, the GOP has seen Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Steve Scalise (R-La.), and Jordan all go down to defeat at the hands of their own caucus colleagues and surprisingly united Democrats. If Joe Biden wasn’t already in full Commander-in-Chief mode with the crisis in the Middle East and Americans held hostage by Hamas, as well as the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the GOP would be handing him the prestige spotlight by default.
The second show of SNL’s 49th season, tonight’s episode sees Bad Bunny both hosting and appearing as musical guest. Joining the elite of Paul Simon, Billi Eilish, Nick Jonas, Harry Styles, Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, MC Hammer and Debbie Harry doing double duty, tonight’s show is actually the second time the most-streamed artist on Spotify has been on with the Not Ready For Primetime Players. Bad Bunny appeared as musical guest on February 20, 2021. The performer released his released his fifth solo album, chart topper Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana, on October 13
Next week will see Nate Bargatze hosting SNL for the first time, with vets the Foo Fighters as the musical act.
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