Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update mocked Donald Trump for once again losing—and thinking he actually had a chance at—the Nobel Peace Prize, and took aim at Pete Hegseth‘s controversial plans for live-streaming a firing squad execution.
The Nobel committee on Friday gave its award to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer and judge who investigated war crimes for the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.
“Unfortunately we have to start tonight with a tragic, developing story involving President Trump. No, not that,” Colin Jost joked. “It’s that President Trump has sadly not won the Nobel Peace Prize… But don’t worry. I think he’s taking it all in stride.”
Jost then cut to the president speaking at a rally in Syracuse, New York on Friday, in which he said “no one has ever heard of” the recipient.
“He’s genuinely angry that he didn’t win the peace prize,” Jost emphasised. “Trump kidnapped Venezuela’s president, then he did so much war that we’re running out of missiles, and he still thought: ‘This is my year.’”
Weekend Update with Colin Jost and Michael Che! https://t.co/f28eexWRHg
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“It’s truly like if I thought I might win an Oscar for Tom & Jerry,” Jost said of the 2021 live-action animated movie.
Co-anchor Michael Che then riffed on how Pillay essentially made fun of Trump’s desire for the award. “If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” she said.
That, Che said, “is a harmless little joke, which may make Trump bomb whatever country he thinks she’s from.”
Che then turned to Hegseth’s announcement that the firing squad execution in December of the Fort Hood mass shooter will be livestreamed.
If those plans hold, Che said, it would result in “the first public execution in the U.S. since—I wanna say, a couple weeks ago?” As he said this, a photo of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed on screen.
Che then reacted to how ICE agents are reportedly planning to use “shock” gloves—”which do not leave marks, and cause incredible pain, hopefully to an agent who forgets to take them off at the urinal.”
Also on Weekend Update, James Austin Johnson portrayed a selfish Kevin O’Leary, the Shark Tank investor who is backing a massive data centre campus in northwest Utah. After strong public and state lawmaker pushback, the facility is still being built, but downsized.
“It’s very simple: All I want is to buy up 40,000 acres of God’s untouched splendour and replace it with a very loud computer that steals your job,” he said. “Is it going to take up precious water? Absolutely. Is it going to provide a necessary service? Who’s to say. But on the flipside, it’s going to make me a tremendous amount of money, and I think that’s great.”
From Rolling Stone US
