Alec Baldwin donned a hairpiece to make a “yuge” debut appearance as Donald Trump during Saturday Night Live‘s 42nd season premiere.
The cold open parodied Monday’s first presidential debate, beginning with Lester Holt, played by Michael Che, introducing the candidates. Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton entered with a cough and a cane, before pulling a “Willy Wonka” and somersaulting onto the stage with her signature wide-eyed smile. Baldwin’s Trump, aided with a pout and an immaculate fake tan, introduced himself with the promise that he would “be so calm, so presidential that all of you watching are going to cream their jeans.”
The sketch poked fun at Clinton’s catchphrase “trumped-up, trickle-down economics” — one of the instances illustrating the major criticism of Clinton coming to the debate overly prepared — as well as her unsuccessful attempts to appear relatable with an anecdote about her “own human father, who I guess made drapes, or printed drapes, or sold drapes — something with drapes.”
Meanwhile, Trump was dinged for putting on a presidential front for only the first part of the debate, before Holt reminds Baldwin’s Trump, “there’s 88 minutes left, it’s a 90-minute debate.” Baldwin panicked, blaming his broken microphone, and claimed Clinton “and [President] Obama broke it, they took my microphone to Kenya and they broke it.”
SNL almost kept Trump and Clinton’s exchange word-for-word in which McKinnon called him unfit to be commander in chief, a chief mouthpiece of the birther movement and a climate change denier, with Baldwin interjecting “wrong” and “shut up.” The one exception was when she implied that Trump has evaded taxes, to which Baldwin replied “warmer.”
McKinnon’s Clinton slowly became more giddy as Baldwin’s Trump made subtly racist remarks to Che’s Holt, calling him “jazz man” and “[John] Coltrane,” a famous African-American jazz musician. Toward the end of the cold open, Baldwin’s Trump replied to Holt with “The thing about blacks…” McKinnon’s jaw dropped and she mimicked a reeling-in motion while he claimed that “blacks are all killing each other.”
“[I don’t have] a response,” McKinnon told Holt after Trump’s race rant, recreating Clinton’s viral shimmy. “Just a request, can America vote now?”
Che was about to introduce the last question when McKinnon suddenly interjected “Alicia Machado.” She continued, “She’s a strong, beautiful political prop that I almost forgot to mention. Though we already made a web video about her.”
In response, Baldwin steered away from the subject, saying, “Lester why are we talking about this woman? We should be talking about the important issues like Rosie O’Donnell and how she’s a fat loser.”
In Baldwin’s closing remarks, he looked ahead of the debate, referencing Trump’s continued attacks against Machado on Twitter for the past week, as well as his much-derided 3 a.m. tweet storm. He also promised, as the real Trump did Saturday, to attack former President Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs while in the Oval Office.
“I’m going to set my alarm for 3:20 am, sit on my golden toilet bowl and tweet about it until completion,” Baldwin said.
