Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update tackled the election of Mike Johnson as the new Speaker of the House, along with Donald Trump‘s latest legal woes.
“After weeks of struggling to elect a new Speaker of the House, Republicans gave up and just generated one with A.I.,” co-anchor Colin Jost began.
“There’s no way Mike Johnson is a real person. He’s supposed to be a conservative Republican, yet he looks like every MSNBC host combined,” Jost continued, showing viewers three dark-haired, glasses-wearing anchors on the left-of-center channel. “I feel like the way Mike Johnson got elected is after weeks of voting, Republicans got bored and they all wrote in the same fake name, and then they were like, ‘Wait, that’s a real guy?’”
Michael Che then brought up some of Johnson’s extreme right-wing stances on social issues.
“Johnson has been called homophobic for supporting anti-LBGTQ legislation and saying homosexuality is ‘bizarre’ and ‘deviant,’ which are two fantastic gay clubs on the West Side, by the way,” he joked.
From there, Jost turned to former President Trump having to testify during his civil fraud trial in New York this week.
Trump “testified on the stand for the first time in over ten years, and it’s fun that nobody is 100% sure which trial this sketch is from,” Jost quipped as a courtroom drawing appeared on screen.
Trump faces federal charges related to his mishandling of classified documents since leaving office and his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. He also faces state charges in New York for falsifying business records, and state RICO charges in Georgia for trying to meddle with that state’s 2020 election results. In total, 91 charges have been filed, all felonies.
Of the civil trial relating to the Trump Organization, which a judge found liable for fraud due to the actions of Trump, his two adult sons, and some executives, Che added:
“Donald Trump’s three oldest children were involved in putting together financial statements for his company. Ivanka wrote the summaries, Don, Jr. put together the numbers, and Eric licked the envelopes.”
And regarding former fixer Michael Cohen’s testimony that Trump would inflate his business assets from $4.5 billion to $6 billion, for instance, Che said:
“‘Four-and-a-half is basically six’ is also what he tells Melania.”