(The Hill) — The latest cold open of “Saturday Night Live” recreated President Donald Trump’s speech at the Rose Garden, where he announced sweeping global tariffs, and drew criticism from a one-time host of the show.
In the introductory voice-over, the narrator declared that the tariffs, “like everything else so far in his presidency, it was a total home run.”
Trump, played by James Austin Johnson, went on to announce the tariffs, which he said was his favorite word because it was “short for tariff-ic idea,” and it was like a “series of random numbers, like the numbers on the computer screen in ‘Severance.'”
He also said the tariffs were an effort to “Make America Great Depression Again,” or “MAGDA.”
“You know what? It’ll be gr — it’ll be better than great,” Johnson’s Trump said. “It’ll be a fantastic, unbelievable Depression, the likes of which you’ve never seen before.”
The skit also referenced Trump’s effort to levy taxes on several uninhabited or sparsely populated islands with little to no exports.
“No country is safe from my tariffs,” Johnson said. “I even put tariffs on an island that is uninhabited by humans.”
Johnson’s Trump also criticized trade with other countries, including South Africa.
“They’ve never even sent us one good thing,” he said before Mike Myers’s Elon Musk, wearing a cheese hat, a reference to Musk’s recent visit to Wisconsin, joined the stage. The tech billionaire flew to Wisconsin the Sunday before the state Supreme Court election to hand out $1 million checks to multiple voters who signed his petition against “activist judges.”
“What about me?” Myers’s Musk asked.
“That was from when I tried to buy the election in Wisconsin,” he added. “I’m an idiot. I should have just bought Wisconsin.”
“Suddenly, no one likes Tesla cars,” he continued. “So I asked myself why and then I answered myself: because of me.” He went on to play a video that introduced a new Tesla that he described as “the first electric car in history to be fully self-vandalizing.”
Reports of vandalism at Tesla dealerships have spiked more broadly since Musk took the spotlight alongside Trump, especially when the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began its purge of federal workers and funding for foreign aid programs.
In response to the skit, Musk wrote on his social media platform X that SNL “hasn’t been funny in a long time.”
“They are their own parody,” the one-time “SNL” host wrote.
