May 10, 2020

Donald Trump Is Going to Hate SNL’s Season Finale

Alec Baldwin—playing the president—drinks bleach.

Even in an episode produced in isolation, Saturday Night Live’s season finale opener delivered. The cast joined a virtual commencement ceremony in which Donald Trump, played by Alec Baldwin, is the only speaker that was available to the class of high school seniors.

“I asked you to vote today on who should be the keynote speaker,” Kate McKinnon’s Principal O’Grady tells the class, via Zoom. “Unfortunately, Barack and Michelle Obama said ‘no,’ as did your next five choices,” which included Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose, the murder hornets, Liberty Mutual’s LiMu Emu, “that dude from 90-Day Fiance who looked like a hedgehog,” and the Elon Musk/Grimes baby. “So I moved on to your eighth choice, receiving one vote, President Donald Trump.”

Baldwin’s Trump congratulates the class of “COVID-19,” and jumps into a lecture in which he claims he’s been treated “even worse than they treated Lincoln,” praises his online college for ranking “number one craziest scam” by US News, and sips from a Clorox bleach container, which he refers to as “invincibility juice.”

He leaves the students with an inspirational quote: “Reach for the stars because if you’re a star, they’ll let you do it.”

Watch the full sketch below. 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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