Saturday Night Live began its final show of the year by poking fun at the Trump administration’s disastrous release of the Epstein files.
The Department of Justice released the latest batch of documents related to the late sex offender on Friday, including fully blacked-out pages of redactions. House Oversight Committee chief Robert Garcia alleged the department violated the Epstein Transparency Act by withholding so much.
“We released all the files, and I come out looking, frankly, very good,” said SNL’s Trump, played once again by cast member James Austin Johnson.
Trump, speaking alone for an address for the entire cold open, showed viewers some joke pages from the Epstein files. One page featured every word blacked out from the page except “Trump,” “didn’t,” “do,” “nothing,” and “bad.”
“We had to redact a few sensitive things, but you’ll get the gist here,” Trump said.
He showed another joke page of the files, in which the few non-censored words read, “Trump does smash, but not, like, wrong kind.”
“See, it’s all there,” said Trump.
The cold open also tore into the real Trump for trying to force the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to change its name to the Trump-Kennedy Center. He already changed the signage on the building, but the name would require congressional approval to be made official.
“I’m actually going to be renaming a number of our other monuments as well,” Trump said.
“Trump-Washington Monument. Trump-Lincoln Memorial,” Trump listed, showing a picture of both monuments with the Trump brand awkwardly superimposed.
Trump’s final name change was to the Statue of Liberty: “Big Elphaba,” he named it, in reference to Elphaba from the Wicked movies. “That one’s just for fun. The third one’s always the funny one.”
“You know, people are saying, ‘Sir, why are you putting your name on so many buildings?’ And I say, ‘It’s because we had to take it off of so many files.’”
Referring to the Epstein files, “SNL” Trump explained, “We had so many Trumps in there, we had to put them somewhere.”
