Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update co-anchor Colin Jost kicked off the latest episode with a segment mocking Donald Trump’s U-turn on tariff policies.
Jost quipped that Trump had spent the past week trying to “rescue the economy from the disastrous policies of whoever was president last week”.
They played a supercut of Trump discussing tariffs endlessly, with Jost saying hearing the president discuss the taxation was “like listening to Bubba Gump talk about shrimp”.
The skit was based on Trump’s partial pullback of his recent blanket tariffs policy, which has so far seen a 25 per cent tax imposed on imported vehicles that went into effect on 3 April.
Trump unveiled a raft of new tariffs after he repeatedly threatened reciprocal dollar-for-dollar tariffs on nations that levy duties on the US on a day he billed as “Liberation Day.”
When markets began to nosedive, Trump announced on Truth Social on Wednesday (9 April) that there would be a 90-day pause on “reciprocal” tariffs while hiking other duties on China to 125 per cent.
Co-host Michael Che parodied Trump’s reaction to the tariffs fallout, in which he said “Sometimes you have to take medicine”, to which Che said: “Yeah, but this feels like we took a whole bottle of medicine with a glass of vodka and laid in a warm bath.”
Che also drew reaction from the crowd when he said: “It was reported that Elon Musk personally appealed to President Trump to stop his tariff plan, and it worked! The stock market went up like this,” he said, as a picture of Musk doing a “Nazi salute” onstage at Trump’s inauguration in January appeared on screen.
Last night’s episode also featured an Easter-themed scene, only for Donald Trump (played by James Austin Johnson) to jump in and compare himself to Jesus.
Johnson appeared onstage in character as Trump, wearing a royal blue suit and red tie, saying: “You know, many people are even calling me the Messiah – because of the mess I, ah, made out of the economy.”
“Or because of my beautiful tariffs – so beautiful – they were working so well that I had to stop them,” he continued.
The sketch opened with Mikey Day as Jesus, recreating the scene from the Bible in which Jesus visits the temple in Jerusalem and expels the merchants and the money changers for their actions.
James Austin Johnson then entered as Trump, saying: “Remind you of anyone?”
“I also got rid of money last week, but instead of one temple, I did a whole country.”
The skit marked the second consecutive week that SNL has mocked Trump, as Johnson appeared in last week’s episode to satirise the president’s rollout of the new policy.
“We had to stop,” Johnson’s Trump said. “But now everything is back exactly how it was, minus a few trillion dollars and an historic transfer of wealth from the middle class to my buddies.”
The skit also took aim at Trump’s varying embrace of religion, with Johnson saying: “Today is the first day of Passover for our Jewish friends, and we call it Passover because it’s when we pass right over the little kosher section in the grocery store. We go straight to that Easter candy. Fish in a jar? No thanks, I want a Peep.”
He added: “We love Easter. We love bunny. We love hunting for eggs – just like everyone’s doing in the grocery store right now, because they cost a billion, trillion dollars. But I thought that was what the whole campaign was about, but I just can’t crack it. Egg joke, here we go.”
“We are looking forward to Easter Mass, definitely,” he went on. “Easter Mass is always packed, right? You know, it’s sad. Some people only go to church on Christmas and Easter. Not me. I don’t go on those days either.”
