New Revelations About ‘SNL’s’ Internal Revolt Over Trump

Saturday Night Live boss Lorne Michaels received more internal pushback for having Donald Trump host the show during his campaign for president in 2015 than had previously been known, according to new biography Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.

The book, written by The New Yorker’s Susan Morrison and set to be released the Tuesday after SNL’s big 50th anniversary special on Sunday, Feb. 16, includes Michaels’ never-before-expressed thoughts on the controversy, including about staffers who believed having Trump on the show was an implicit endorsement of his candidacy.

“It’s the hardest thing for me to explain to this generation that the show is nonpartisan,” Michaels said two weeks before Trump was elected the first time, according to the book. “We have our biases, we have our people we like better than others, but you can’t be Samantha Bee.” (Morrison adds that he “meant one-sided and strident.”)

But the show’s writers weren’t convinced that Michaels hadn’t been open to “helping” Trump—a sentiment that was only bolstered amongst staff who recalled to Morrison that Michaels had wanted to “tone down a harsh Trump sketch” and allow him to show “some charm.”

Writer Tim Robinson, who would go on to create his own hit Netflix show I Think You Should Leave, is quoted saying at the time, “Lorne has lost his f---ing mind and someone needs to shoot him in the back of the head.”

Even though Michaels held that Trump’s hosting gig went well among staff—noting to Morrison that Kate McKinnon and Larry David “both said, ‘I really like the guy’” at the after-party—other staffers have said that Trump spent his week at the show “alienating” cast members, rudely taking calls during rehearsals, and stumbling over basic words and punctuations during read-through.

Michaels has insisted that he viewed Trump’s presidential candidacy as “a big joke” at that stage of the campaign. But staffers whispered that he had secretly wanted to help his “billionaire friend” by having him on. When Trump’s current right-hand man Elon Musk hosted the show in 2021, staffers saw the move as further confirmation.

Following Trump’s hosting stint in November 2015, Michaels called in Alec Baldwin to play him on the show, telling him at the time that it would be for “three episodes” tops, since, “There’s no way he’s going to win.” Baldwin ended up playing the president on the show as a de facto cast member for the entirety of his first term.

Trump, who also hosted the show during The Apprentice’s initial run in 2004, ultimately turned on the show publicly after Baldwin played him as an “unstable bully,” in Morrison’s words, and hasn’t appeared on it since.

Michaels told Morrison that he “bailed” on the idea of having the real Trump or Hillary Clinton on the show during the general election “because it got too ugly.”

Michaels’ moves continued to breed bad will among some staffers, who Morrison writes, “continued to feel that they were responsible for the national disaster” of Trump’s election. As they entered the writers room on 2016’s election night, some “sobbing,” according to the book, Michaels had tried to comfort them, saying, “We did our best.”

Since many had felt “the show had been criminally soft on Trump,” in the run-up to the election, Morrison writes that those staffers were “confused and annoyed” by Michaels’ statement.

That first show after the 2016 election opened with Kate McKinnon in a white pantsuit as Hillary Clinton, playing “Hallelujah” on the piano as if at a funeral. (“Thank god Leonard Cohen died,” Michaels apparently said to himself when the song’s writer died earlier that week.) She looked at the camera, teary-eyed at the end, and said, “I’m not giving up and neither should you. And live from New York, it’s Saturday night!”

The opening didn’t go over well with some viewers—“Where are the jokes?” Chris Rock had asked Michaels during rehearsal. Internal tension continued as staff tried to reconcile the show’s role in Trump’s win.

Dave Chappelle “smirked” in 30 Rock’s halls amid staff somberness following the election news: “Y’all ­really betted against the rich white guy,” he’s quoted as saying, “That’s like betting against the Harlem Globetrotters.” That sentiment turned into the first real sketch of the night in which Chappelle and Rock played two Black men who mocked their white millennial friends for being shocked by the election results.

A very different sketch that Michaels didn’t let get past the show’s Wednesday read-through the day after the election featured then-cast member Beck Bennett getting a call that Trump was cancelling SNL and replacing it with a new show called “Body Shamers.”

A distraught Aidy Bryant replied, “But we helped him get elected!”