Watch ‘SNL’ Recap Turmoil at White House in Cold Open Sketch
Saturday Night Live tackled the “turmoil” in the White House with a cold open that touched on the firings of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. John Goodman reprised the role of Tillerson for the sketch while Fred Armisen again appeared as Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff.
The sketch opened with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, played by Kate McKinnon, discussing why he fired McCabe just hours before the acting director’s retirement took effect, thus costing McCabe his pension.
“Mr. McCabe was in clear violation… because of his lack… candor? I don’t know, I can’t even dance around. Trump made me do it. He saw too much,” Sessions said of the Trump-mandated firing.
“Look, I’m always down to clown but this was sneaky even for me. I’m just a simple man who wanted to make things bad for immigrants, and now here I am taking away the pension of a Christian white. It isn’t right!”
Goodman’s Tillerson then joined CNN to talk about his own abrupt firing, which many believed came via Donald Trump tweet.
“Well that’s not true. John Kelly called me personally. He said, ‘Where are you?’ I said ‘Sir, that’s private.’ He said, ‘Oh good, are you on the toilet because I got some news,'” Tillerson said. “It’s just crazy how one day you’re the CEO of Exxon, a $50 billion company, and the next day you get fired by a man who used to sell steaks in the mail,” he added, pulverizing his glass of water.
Later in the sketch, after Armisen’s Wolff and Bill Hader’s Anthony Scaramucci joined the panel, Tillerson exclaimed, “Trump is a moron! Sorry, I just blurted that one out. Feels nice to say what I want. Someone call Jurassic Park because the Rex-y is loose.”
During this week’s Hader-hosted episode, Weekend Update also reported on the McCabe firing as well as Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ nightmarish 60 Minutes interview: