Just a couple of hours after Vice President JD Vance announced that marathon peace talks with Iran produced no agreement, Saturday Night Live opened with Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) and Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost) reveling in the negotiation failure and the prospect of bombing again.
After speaking by cell phone from the Oval Office with Tiger Woods and First Lady Melania Trump, the president contacts Hegseth, who asked, “Is it true what I heard? Are you actually negotiating with these herbs?”
Trump replied, “You know what? Don’t worry about the negotiations. I just heard they’re going really, really bad. I sent in my secret weapon, JD Vance. After those Iranians spent 20 hours to JD, they said, ‘Please sir, just go back to bombing us.”
“Very good sir,” Hegseth responded. “Even hearing about someone getting bombed just made me hard as hell.”
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“That’s great, that’s great. I’m rigged as well,” Trump replied.
In reality, Vance, speaking from Islamabad, announced at around 9:30 p.m. ET that “the bad news is we have not reached an agreement.”
The SNL skit opened with Trump speaking to his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt (Ashley Padilla), dictating his now infamous Easter morning Truth Social post in which he wrote to the Iranians, “Open the F—in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”
“You think I should type ‘Praise be to Allah.’ And that’s from you, the president of the United States?” Padilla’s Leavitt asked him.
“Yes. Yes. Allah. They say Allah. It’s a sarcastic attack on the world’s largest religion. They famously have a great sense of humor about that kind of stuff,” Johnson’s Trump said. [The president, did in fact, include that in his Truth Social post.]
Leavitt responded, “As your press secretary, this puts me in a tough position.”
Trump replied, “Oh, don’t worry about that, Karoline. Like I said to Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem right before I fired them, ‘You’re doing a terrific job.’”
Johnson’s Trump then broke the fourth wall, adding, “All three of those were played by Ashley. It’s an interesting detail.”
Trump next called Woods (Kenan Thompson), asking him if he was playing in the Masters this weekend.
“I don’t know sir if you remember, but I flipped by car and got a DUI,” Woods reminded him.
Trump told him, “You should have told the cops we were friends and they would have let you off.”
Woods replied, “Well, I did, and they didn’t.”
In reality, Woods, after the crash, told a deputy that he had been talking to the president.
Next, Trump got a call from his wife Melania (Chloe Fineman).
She told him, “Listen, I decided I should do a big, random speech, completely out of nowhere, and say I am not an Epstein victim. Is that good?”
Trump replied, “Darling, I got to admit, this sounds a little insane. Who are you? Me?”
In reality, the first lady did deliver a statement, coming out of no where, denying ties to Epstein.
Fineman’s Melania continued, “I thought I could also say, I, Melania Trump, in no way helped out the Gilgo Beach serial killer.”
Trump said, “Darling, I think that’s gonna make everyone way more suspicious.”
She then offered, “What if I announce I barely partied with Diddy? Would that help?”
Trump then got off the phone, telling his wife he has a meeting with “Ronald Reagan.”
Then he said to himself, “Let’s see. Anything else I am forgetting. There’s got to be something … All right, the war.”