Donald Trump Hosts “Saturday Night Live”

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump hosted “Saturday Night Live” last night, and it’s pretty much everything you expected – SNL continuing to mock Trump but not TOO much, Trump pulling in big ratings for NBC, and several comedians dusting off their “HUGE” impressions.

“Part of the reason I’m here is that I know how to take a joke,” Trump said in his opening monologue. “They’ve done so much to ridicule me over the years, this show has been a disaster for me.” He was then joined by two SNL cast members dressed as himself.

Later, Larry David made a surprise, totally-not-scripted appearance to heckle Trump about being a racist, because he heard he’d get $5,000 from activist group DeportRacism if he did. DeportRacisim, to their credit, said they would pay up the five grand.

Then there was this parody of Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” which will haunt my dreams forever. Did he get jealous of Bernie Sanders on “The Ellen Show” or something?

I suppose we can’t mock him too much – Entertainment Weekly reported that Trump gave SNL their highest ratings in years:

According to NBC, SNL had a whopping 6.6 household rating on Saturday night, easily beating the season’s previous high: the 41st season premiere last month, hosted by Miley Cyrus and with a guest appearance by none other than … Hillary Clinton. In fact, Trump’s overnight rating was 47 percent higher than the Miley/Hillary episode.

Welp, I guess that means he’s president now.

The Liberal Media thought he did a terrible job, of course. In this New York Times review, James Poniewozik panned Trump’s performance:

[T]he show used Mr. Trump, or the idea of Mr. Trump, in predictable ways, as in a sketch he introduced that mocked a limp restaurant gag with mean tweets. His most specifically political bit was the first full-length sketch, which imagined Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in 2018 after having defeated ISIS, gotten Mexico to pay for a border wall and made the Russian leader, Vladimir V. Putin, cry by insulting him.

Our host Ava Gordy has more highlights and reactions from the show, including an explanation of the “equal time” rule for politicians on network TV: