Saturday Night Live continues to skate on thin ice, where President Donald Trump is concerned, given his recent hostility toward late-night TV.
On Saturday’s “Weekend Update” segment, cohost Colin Jost teed up a seemingly innocent joke about the President and his wife, Melania Trump, walking out to the White House’s Halloween festivities to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” — only to deliver a brutal punchline.
“My favorite part is when Trump and Melania made a grand entrance to this song: Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,'” Jost noted, laughing at the subsequent clip of POTUS and FLOTUS’s trumpet-aided arrival. “Just the perfect soundtrack to lure kids to a famous mansion.”
The audience clapped and laughed at the latest spectacle from the White House — then Jost’s joke clearly sank in. Groans overrode the laughs as the studio audience connected the dots between the former Apprentice host and the late pop legend.
Jackson was at the height of his fame in 1993 when the first allegations of child sexual abuse first fell upon him. Dentist Evan Chandler accused the “Bad” singer of sexually abusing his 13-year-old son, allegations amplified (and then retracted) by Jackson’s sister LaToya. Though Jackson and the Chandlers settled the following year, a decade later, Jackson would be hit with seven more counts of child sexual abuse and stand trial for his alleged crimes.
Though Trump has not been personally accused of child sexual abuse, his long-standing affiliation with the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein continues to dog his second term in office. Following allegations of rape, sexual assault, and harassment from at least 25 women over the past 50 years, and losing a sexual abuse civil case brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019, Trump has now repeatedly been asked to explain his public, decades-long, well-documented friendship to Epstein, who was charged with sex trafficking of minors before hie died in jail in 2019.
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Trump recently filed a $10 billion defamation suit against The Wall Street Journal for revealing the contents of a birthday card he allegedly sent Epstein in 2003. A copy of the card eventually released by Congress shows a sort of poem contained within a drawing of a silhouette of a woman’s naked body.
“Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?” the card’s message reads, before concluding, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
The president denied the card existed before it was released, then denied he authored the card, telling the Journal, “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women.”
Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty
Nov. 1’s “Weekend Update” also contained some edgy Trump jokes from Jost’s cohost Michael Che.
“Critics of President Trump are calling him tone deaf for posting pictures of his newly renovated White House bathroom during the government shutdown,” Che quipped. “But I’m happy that the floor looks slippery!”
