NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” opened its latest Weekend Update segment by ridiculing President Donald Trump’s persistent grievances over failing to win the Nobel Peace Prize, before shifting fire to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s contentious Pentagon initiatives.
Co-anchor Colin Jost started the satirical news desk by framing the international award as a breaking national crisis. “Unfortunately we have to start tonight with a tragic, developing story involving President Trump. No, not that,” Jost said, according to Rolling Stone. “It’s that President Trump has sadly not won the Nobel Peace Prize… But don’t worry. I think he’s taking it all in stride.”
Jokes on the Nobel Peace Prize
Jost then displayed video footage from Trump’s Friday campaign stop in Syracuse, New York, where the president lashed out at the Norwegian Nobel Committee for honoring South African jurist and human rights advocate Navanethem “Navi” Pillay. Pillay has previously served as a United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and as an international tribunal judge.
“He’s genuinely angry that he didn’t win the peace prize,” Jost said, according to The Daily Beast. “Trump kidnapped Venezuela’s president, then he did so much war that we’re running out of missiles, and he still thought: ‘This is my year.’” Jost compared Trump’s expectations to his own acting career, telling viewers that the idea was equivalent to him expecting an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in the critically panned 2021 live-action movie “Tom & Jerry.”
Co-anchor Michael Che followed by referencing Pillay’s comments during a conference in Germany, where she quipped to the audience that she might share the award with Trump if attendees cheered more enthusiastically. Che noted that Pillay delivered “a harmless little joke, which may make Trump bomb whatever country he thinks she’s from,” Rolling Stone reported.
The jokes arrived after Trump spent several days attacking the Nobel committee. In a Truth Social post on Saturday, the president argued that he had “settled 8 Wars” and cited actions including strikes against Iranian nuclear targets and the apprehension of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who faces federal narco-terrorism charges in New York, according to the New York Post. Trump called the committee’s decision an “indelible stain on the country of Norway” and asserted the prize had been discredited.
Satirizing Defense Department Plans
The broadcast turned sharper when Che addressed the Pentagon’s announcement that the U.S. military intends to livestream the December execution of the Fort Hood mass shooter by firing squad. Che joked that the broadcast would mark the nation’s first public execution since “a couple weeks ago,” while displaying an image of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raiding a residence, The Daily Beast reported.
Che also poked fun at reports that federal immigration officers may employ stun gloves during enforcement actions, remarking that the devices cause significant pain “hopefully to an agent who forgets to take them off at the urinal.”
Jost added a barb directed at Hegseth’s revamped “Department of War” emblem. After noting that critics observed similarities between the emblem’s angular eagle and historical Nazi iconography, Jost mimicked a hand motion resembling a Nazi salute while asking how upset people were “on a scale of here to here,” according to The Daily Beast.
Utah Data Center Parody
The segment also featured cast member James Austin Johnson portraying “Shark Tank” personality Kevin O’Leary, who has backed a contested, massive data center facility in northwest Utah that was recently downsized following public resistance.
Johnson’s character bluntly explained the venture as an effort to acquire thousands of acres of nature to install “a very loud computer that steals your job,” adding that while it would strain water resources, “it’s going to make me a tremendous amount of money, and I think that’s great,” Rolling Stone reported.
Neither the White House nor the Department of Defense issued an immediate response to the broadcast, and it remains unclear whether the administration intends to alter its scheduled December military execution protocols despite widening public scrutiny.
