The British star is both host and musical guest in a week that takes in everything from Trump’s cabinet picks to the release of WickedSaturday Night Live kicks off at the White House, where lame duck President Joe Biden (Dana Carvey) and President re-elect Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) hold a transition meeting for the press. Instead of “being rude and crazy, like usual”, Trump is doing “quiet and serene, which is, in many ways, a lot scarier”, while Biden, like the cartoon dog in the popular meme, claims everything is fine while ignoring the giant fire behind him.Once the press leaves, Trump brags about the cabinet he’s assembling: Elon Musk and Matt Gaetz (“That’s an alien v. predator”), Kristi Noem and Robert F Kennedy Jr (“They’re killing the dogs, they’re killing the bears”), and Melania (“working remotely from divorce”). Sleazy creep Gaetz and grotesque wackjob RFK Jr show up, played, respectively by Sarah Sherman in giant forehead prosthetics and a gravel-voiced Alec Baldwin. Both caricatures are appropriately mean, but if the show is going to continue using them, it needs to take care not to sanitize the real people, as it has done with dangerously incompetent and malicious figures in the past, such as George W Bush or Trump himself. Continue reading...