Saturday Night Live is helping Trump

“Me and Vice President Harris are the same!” concluded Saturday Night Live veteran Dana Carvey, in character as Joe Biden, when he returned to NBC’s legendary sketch comedy show for the first episode of its fiftieth anniversary season. After Carvey, who left SNL’s regular ensemble in 1993, uttered those politically unhelpful words, former cast member Maya Rudolph, playing Kamala Harris, nervously gave him the bum rush off stage, only for him to wander back on to smell her hair — one of Biden’s stranger campaign trail moves — before the two delivered the show’s signature, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” line to a cheering studio audience, millions of viewers at home and millions more who (like me) caught it later via social media streaming.

In that one skit, SNL did what risk-averse Republican bien-pensants have advised their party not to do since Harris took over from Biden as the Democratic nominee in July: explicitly link her to Biden’s administration rather than focus on Harris at a polite policy level. SNL, however, roared back from decades of creative torpor and reliable allegiance to the progressive left to do exactly that.

The humble players did not stop there. The first episode’s cold open also mocked Harris’s empty rhetoric and banal catch phrases, made fun of her vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s folksy non-sequiturs, sent up Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s beta male personality, singed vain ABC News journalist David Muir’s obvious bias in the Trump-Harris presidential debate and — transgressing another taboo that establishment Republicans have compliantly observed — poked fun at her DEI credentials by having her groove in a 1990s hip-hop minstrelsy that was convincing enough for the character to wonder why Trump couldn’t quite believe Harris was really black.

A week later, the second episode’s cold open reprised Carvey’s Biden to offer hilariously nonsensical advice as Harris and Emhoff tuned in to watch Walz flounder in the vice presidential debate. The jokes were funny, and the message Harris and allied media have been trying desperately to avoid was clear: she and Biden are inseparable partners leading an incumbent administration that deserves not principled criticism directed at Harris, but devastating ridicule, as a team, for years of failure, culminating in Biden’s severe cognitive decline, which Harris obviously knew about and covered up.

There is no telling how many people saw SNL’s fresh material, but the new season’s first episode was its highest-rated premiere in four years, and the show’s short skits are the perfect length to circulate widely via social media. Regardless of the exact figures, Trump, who derided the show during his presidency as “totally biased,” “not funny,” “really bad television” and even “an illegal campaign contribution” to the Democrats, might take satisfaction in knowing that SNL has done more to link Harris to Biden in two episodes than the weak-kneed GOP establishment has done in the two months since Harris became the Democratic nominee. While no one could ever mistake the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board for comedians, and while SNL’s cast and crew haven’t shied away from mocking Trump in turn, it could their sense of equal time — and their devastating timing — that decides the election.