‘Saturday Night Live’ Cold Open Features Lin-Manuel Miranda As ‘Hamilton’ Getting Quickly Frozen In Time By A Riffing “King” Donald Trump

Ted Johnson
·3-min read

Lin-Manuel Miranda returned to his role as Alexander Hamilton for the Saturday Night Live cold open, in a sketch where he and other founding fathers have their independence celebration frozen in time by Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson), gloating in his return to the presidency .

At the start, Miranda and the other founding fathers went into the lyrics: In America, all men are created equal. America, not England, we do in the sequel. We will have leaders, but no one thing. In America, we will never have a king.

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Then, Trump entered and the rap comes to a stop. “Never say never,” Trump said. “Kidding, though in many ways I am not. I’m in my king era. But just like the founding fathers, I am creating a new country as well, and just like them, we’re doing it very whitely.“

The skit featured Johnson’s Trump going on about his inauguration week, reveling in the attention, his blitz of executive orders, and his list of unqualified cabinet nominees, while Miranda’s Hamilton and the other founding fathers stand still.

At one point, Miranda struggled not to break character, as Johnson’s Trump said to him, “He’s in sniffing distance of an EGOT and he’s got to stand there til I’m done.”

The skit had Trump riffing on the events of the week, boasting up to a point. “It’s been a great week. I basically hit all my campaign promises, except for the one thing people cared about — price of eggs. All time high,” he said. “Who would thought it would be easier to get a ceasefire in Gaza than bring down the price of eggs? Might have to take the ‘L’ on that one.”

As Trump went on, he naturally commented on one of the inauguration’s bigger controversies, when his close ally Elon Musk spoke at Capitol One Arena and gave a Nazi-like salute to the crowd. Twice.

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“They say he did the Nazi salute,” Trump said. “Not true. Okay. He simply was creating a new greeting, a cross between ‘hi’ and ‘hello.’ We’re calling it a ‘heil.'”

During his first term, the real Trump took to Twitter to bash SNL, but that is when Alec Baldwin was portraying him. This season, Trump has said little about Johnson’s portrayal, even though he has lashed out at another NBC late-night personality, Seth Meyers. In a very monarch-like way, Trump has threatened NBC’s parent Comcast, warning that they should “pay a big price” for their satiric content.

Trump, of course, also loves the adulation, which was especially true this week as Silicon Valley moguls earned choice seats at Trump’s swearing in after each shelling out seven figures to his inaugural committee.

The skit ended with Trump telling Miranda, “You’ve been a great sport, frankly, a really good friend. I want to thank him for his generous, anonymous, $1 million donation to my campaign. I know that was you Lin!”

“No it was not,” Miranda, a longtime Democrat, insisted.

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