“Saturday Night Live” tried to cover as many headlines as possible as it kicked off the first episode of 2026 with a riff on the entire White House cabinet.
The show’s resident President Donald Trump impersonator, James Austin Johnson, started the sketch by bragging about his Christmas haul, namely two souvenirs from U.S. forces’ early January raid into Venezuela.
“I got what I wanted: My very own someone else’s Nobel Prize,” he gloated, holding up a framed award with his name sloppily taped over the original.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado handed her Nobel Peace Prize over to Trump on Thursday, an apparent bid to curry favor as the U.S. tightens its grip on the oil-rich South American nation.
Johnson’s Trump then boasted that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had turned up in his stocking, calling the president’s Jan. 3 capture a “reverse-Santa.”
“We came down the chimney with a bag and took him away,” he said of Maduro, who is now in U.S. custody facing drug charges.
Nodding to “Frankenstein” director Guillermo del Toro, Johnson introduced his “little cabinet of curiosities,” describing the group as “various monsters and nightmares from the twisted mind of Guillermo del Trump.”
As Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Ashley Padilla took the podium in full glam and a cowboy hat, attempting to minimize outrage over the surge of immigration enforcement in Minnesota.
“There’s been clashes on both sides in Minneapolis. And have we been perfect? Yes,” Padilla’s faux Noem declared, airbrushing operations that included the Jan. 7 killing of a woman by an ICE agent and widespread reports of excessive force.
“I know a lot of people looking at the situation in Minnesota are wondering the same thing: ‘Can I join ICE?’” she added, before rattling off a brutal checklist.
“Is your neck wider than your head? Are you currently wearing a Punisher T-shirt? Have you ever punched a hole in the wall because your son took a dance class?” she asked. “If the answer is ‘yes,’ then grab a gun, any gun, and saddle up, big boy.”
Next to the lectern was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, played by a boisterous Colin Jost, who swaggered in clutching a tub of creatine.
Summing up the administration’s military posture in the crassest way possible, Jost declared, “We went into Venezuela and como se dice? We tea-bagged their country.”
“We’ve been rockin’ out with our C’s out all over the world,” he continued. “We dunked on Venezuela. Next, we’re gonna sack-tap Iran.”
Jost’s Hegseth then warned, “You don’t dare kill your protestors, that’s our thing,” referring to political protests that have left hundreds dead.
“So just remember, you ‘F’ with America, we’re gonna ‘F’ you right back,” he said, before recreating viral clips of the real secretary’s fitness routine by swinging a kettlebell to and fro with suggestive hip thrusts.
Watch the full sketch here:
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