No more Trump, ‘SNL’

America made it clear last night: We’re tired. We’re over it. And it’s time to move on.

Take the message, SNL. No more Donald Trump.

It’s been a long ten years. For the past decade, Trump has had a stranglehold on our politics, our nation and our cold opens.

Seriously. I ran the numbers.

Beginning with Alec Baldwin taking over the SNL portrayal of Trump when he was running for president at the beginning of Season 42, some version of Trump has appeared in 93 of 205 episodes. That era stretches from Baldwin to James Austin Johnson, with one appearance of Shane Gillis as Trump in the mix.

Ninety-three episodes!

That’s an absurd number. Trump wasn’t even president for four of those years.

By my math, Baldwin played Trump in 15 episodes in Season 42, 10 episodes in Season 43, seven episodes in Season 44, six episodes in the pandemic-shortened Season 45 and four episodes in Season 46.

Baldwin’s four appearances as Trump in Season 46 came over the season’s first six episodes. That sixth episode came the night when the 2020 presidential election was called for Joe Biden. Lorne Michaels immediately and silently scuttled not only Baldwin but also Jim Carrey as Biden and Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris.

It was almost a full year until SNL brought Trump back, with Johnson’s take on Trump premiering on Nov. 6, 2021. It’s a great impression, but it quickly spiraled out of control.

Johnson has portrayed Trump six times in Season 47, eight times in the strike-shortened Season 48, six times in Season 49 (Gillis played Trump once), 13 times in Season 50, 14 times in Season 51 and already three times over the first four episodes of Season 52.

It’s been a long decade. The Baldwin era made SNL angry. It made it dark. It stifled the careers of so many SNL cast members. The Johnson era is different. Johnson is a fantastic Trump, but people don’t want to see every episode of SNL begin with Trump anymore. Especially not when in the increasingly lazy and insulting ways that SNL has turned to forcing Trump into cold opens.

Episodes don’t always have to begin with a political sketch. It’s perfectly fine for a cold open to not address the news of the week. Trump has already permeated our lives everywhere else. A break for the 90 minutes of SNL would be nice. It would also take a burden off the show’s writers, who have found themselves having to write Trump-centric cold opens after federal agents shot and killed a man in Minneapolis.

The David S. Pumpkins debacle was the final straw.

Teasing viewers with the return of a fan-favorite character only to have Johnson’s Trump pull the “I’m breaking the fourth wall!” move was already bad enough. Having Johnson’s Trump then mock viewers for being foolish enough to be excited that Tom Hanks and Bobby Moynihan returned to SNL for a new David S. Pumpkins sketch is unforgivable.

I saw someone over on Threads boldly assert that SNL’s overuse of Trump had a purpose. “Most people hated it and felt cheated,” this person wrote. “But that's the whole point. SNL is continuing this bit they started this season to show us that Trump ruins things and makes any situation he's in all about himself.”

That’s absolutely not what’s happening here. In a normal world, we’d get the occasional cold open about the president. (Think of how rarely Jay Pharoah played Barack Obama.) SNL brought Baldwin on back in 2016 thinking that Trump would lose and the show would return to normal. The show never returned to normal. The world never returned to normal. It’s now been so long that Michaels and SNL have forgotten how to balance things.

The show’s obsession with Trump has gone so far that it’s now turned recurring sketches toxic. That should end this weekend.

No more Trump, SNL.

Check out the complete list of SNL Season 52 hosts, musical guests and reviews.

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