Yahoo Lifestyle MAGA Couldn’t Handle Tom Hanks Playing a Racist Trumper on ‘SNL’
Saturday Night Live celebrated its 50th anniversary over the weekend, and while it’s more or less impossible to mount a three-and-a-half-hour variety show that pleases everyone, a single joke in this marathon running time has deeply upset thin-skinned Trump voters.
Back in 2016, before Donald Trump was first elected president, SNL aired an installment of their long-running “Black Jeopardy!” series, in which Kenan Thompson presents a skewed version of the quiz show with more colloquial questions and irreverent answers — and non-Black contestants find themselves at a certain disadvantage. But this wasn’t the case for Doug, a MAGA-hatted character played by host Tom Hanks, who despite his background ended up being a big winner on the show. The sketch is one of the most-watched SNL videos on YouTube, with nearly 84 million views.
For SNL50, “Black Jeopardy!” brought in Leslie Jones, Tracy Morgan, Eddie Murphy, and Chris Rock — a stacked ensemble any way you slice it. But with Trump now back in office for a second term, it must have felt appropriate to bring fan-favorite Doug into the mix once again. Hanks showed up in his MAGA hat toward the end of the sketch, and, true to form, took control of the board. He then offered the opinion that more people should go to church. Thompson’s character readily agreed and went to shake Doug’s hand, only to have the Trumper physically recoil as if afraid for his life.
The gag didn’t get much of a reaction from the studio audience, and it certainly didn’t recall Doug’s original appearance, in which he gets along surprisingly well with everyone else on “Black Jeopardy!” For the average viewer, it could have been dismissed as a simple misfire in an overstuffed show that was bound to have its share of underwhelming moments. For actual MAGA diehards, it was nothing short of an outrage.
“Tom Hanks in a MAGA hat, horrified at the idea of shaking a black man’s hand, tells you everything you need to know about what the left has learned since November and why they will thankfully continue to lose landslide election after landslide election for the foreseeable future,” wrote an incensed user on X who shared the clip, racking up more than 4 million views on the platform. Right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson echoed this sentiment, writing, “Donald Trump just won a landslide election and has never been more popular with Americans. They have learned nothing.”
Jeannette Garcia, a member of the Avondale, Arizona, city council, shared a selfie on X in which she wore a MAGA hat, and baselessly smeared Hanks as a pedophile. She added: “Not ALL #MAGA hat wearing patriots are white. In fact, most racism comes from the elite Democrats, you a** hole.” The post was quoted by site owner Elon Musk, who captioned it with a pair of fire emojis. Another X user went viral with a video in which he does his own “impression” of a MAGA voter, donning the hat and holding up a piece of paper that reads “TOM HANKS IS A PEDOPHILE.”
Unfounded accusations that Hanks has committed sex crimes are nothing new for far-right conspiracy theorists, who routinely suggest without evidence that Hollywood A-listers and prominent Democrats belong to a vast sex-trafficking cabal. Fury over the “Black Jeopardy!” taunt saw Trump’s most prolific social media soldiers recycling those claims. “Is Tom Hanks on the Epstein List?” asked one major MAGA personality on X, in a post that has been viewed more a million times and tallied 40,000 likes. (Hanks has never been linked to Jeffrey Epstein, though Trump’s relationship with the deceased sex trafficker is well documented.) Musk, who has claimed that Epstein accomplice and convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell “photobombed” him in a notorious picture of the pair together, has previously amplified memes suggesting a connection between Hanks and Epstein.
QAnon promoter Dom Lucre, whose X account was reinstated by Musk after he was suspended for posting child sexual abuse material, also condemned Hanks, asserting that he “just disrespected every Republican on SNL.”
But this cheap indignation seems unlikely to last amid the sheer chaos of the second Trump administration, which has seen thousands of federal employees — including many who voted for him — sacked by Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), while top government agency officials continue to quit in protest of its takeover. Trump himself, never shy about attacking his, critics, SNL, or celebrities opposed to his politics, didn’t even bother to address the dig at his supporters.
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