The most revealing moment in the new SNL sketch with Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels
If you haven’t yet seen last night’s new episode of Saturday Night Live, and you don’t want the surprises spoiled for you, stop reading now. If you’re still here, we’re going to talk about the star-studded opening sketch, which included guest appearances from Alec Baldwin, Scarlett Johannson, Jimmy Fallon, Martin Short, Ben Stiller, and (the real) Stormy Daniels. But the most revealing moment came when none of them were on the screen.
SNL and Stormy Daniels both scored a major coup with the brilliant idea to simply have her portray herself in last night’s sketch. This was so on-point that it managed to overshadow Short’s surprise appearance as Trump’s wacky Doctor Bornstein, or Kate McKinnon’s stunning ability to transform herself into Rudy Giuliani. But at the core of the sketch was Michael Cohen’s frantic desire to get himself out of a hole by calling anyone willing to listen.
At one point, when Trump and Cohen and his various co-conspirators were acting like idiots in cartoonish yet true-to-life fashion, the SNL cameras briefly cut away to a pair of fictional FBI agents who were listening in on Cohen’s call. The agents simply threw up their hands as if they couldn’t believe what they were hearing. It’s a reminder that for all their criminal ambition, Trump and his goons are, in fact, complete idiots.
There’s a reason the progressively more damning evidence against Donald Trump and his co-conspirators keeps surfacing so reliably, no matter how much they scramble to try to cover up their actions. Trump has only ever surrounded himself with people based on their willingness to flatter him and commit crimes on his behalf, and never based on their intelligence or competence. These folks are the keystone cops of treason. It’s why they’re all going down for their crimes in the end.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report