In the NBC show’s ongoing Melania Moments segments, SNL imagines the potential next first lady as the subject of a new-agey VHS vignette, the kind of format that the show’s Jack Handey bits sent up in the ‘90s. This past weekend, Cecily Strong’s Melania gazed at her housemaid and imagined trading places with her, The Prince and the Pauper-style. “She thought, ‘I could go out into the world,’” the narrator said. “‘See a bus. See a hill. Or even feel the texture of sand. She’d stay here and lay under Donald. Not a fair trade, but oh how I’d love to touch sand.’”

The two previous Moments have also made Melania out to be a luxurious captive, isolated from the world, deeply and passively unhappy. In the first such skit, Melania looked down from the Trump Tower and wondered about the world below (“Is there a Sixth Avenue?”). In the second, she sensed her “replacement” being born in rural Latvia. “I must find this girl and vanish her to the woods, she thought to herself,” the narrator said. “Not for my sake, but for hers.”

SNL’s version of Melania also starred in this week’s Melanianade sketch, which reimagined Beyoncé’s “Sorry”—a kiss-off to a reckless husband—as coming from the women in Donald Trump’s life. In it, Melania, Ivanka, Tiffany, Kellyanne Conway, and Omarosa sang about being fed up: “Without us you wouldn’t be standing there / You’d just be that guy with the weird hair.” At one point, Melania took a baseball bat to a TV showing news about sexual-misconduct allegations against Donald. But at the end, Alec Baldwin’s Donald showed up and gave the women orders—and they obeyed. Melania’s rebellion was just a lark.

Real-life photo shoots of Melania forking up jewels as if they’re spaghetti, and quotes about striving to serve her husband without “nagging” him, have certainly contributed to this characterization. But the actual Melania probably deserves more credit for making her own choices. She’s often described the way she met Trump with an anecdote that emphasizes her agency: At a Fashion Week party in 1998, Donald reportedly asked for her number but she insisted that he be the one to give her his contact info. But a different origin story has been following her around, in which it’s falsely implied she was basically a mail-order bride. Here’s Strong’s Melania in an SNL sketch from a year ago: “I was in Slovenia and Donald saw a picture of me in magazine and he called me and he said, ‘Hey, come to America.’”

A fiction like that allows for an image of powerlessness, servitude, and pure transaction. SNL’s ongoing joke plays on both sides of the line between sympathy and mockery, expressing awareness of the underlying human being but also showing disdain rooted in the assumption she’s not in charge of her own life. It’s a projection resulting from being unable to believe that someone could happily stay married to someone like Donald Trump.