Saturday Night Live had its season premiere tonight. If you haven’t yet seen it, and you don’t want the surprises spoiled, then you’ll want to stop reading this article right now. Okay, still with us? Let’s talk about what SNL had to say about Donald Trump’s current situation, in its first opportunity in several months.

Despite the usual talk that Alec Baldwin would be pulling back from portraying Donald Trump on SNL this season, tonight’s cold open began with him in the Oval Office, frantically calling people to try to save himself from being impeached. At one point he was on the phone with Rudy Giuliani (played brilliantly by Kate McKinnon), discussing his most scandalous secrets without realizing that Rudy was live on CNN at the time. Trump then tried to get Bill Barr to take the fall, before calling a hapless Mike Pence and telling him that he was taking the fall.

Trump also reached out to his friends Kanye West and Don King, only to find out that they’re no longer his friends now that he’s being impeached. “Say goodbye to the douchebag,” they said before hanging up on Trump. At one point Trump tried to hire Ray Donovan, only for the real Liev Schreiber to inform Trump that Ray Donovan is a fictional character.

We’ve been waiting to see how Saturday Night Live would approach Donald Trump’s prospects once the new season got started. Sure enough, SNL painted Trump tonight as finally being in the kind of trouble that he can’t get out of, even as his allies pull away from him, and Trump desperately fishes around for magical fixes to his unfixable scandals. In other words, SNL generally agrees with our assessment that Trump is toast. Perhaps Alec Baldwin won’t have to keep portraying Trump much longer after all.



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