The premise is that Mueller is closing in.
“Eric?” asks Day’s Trump Jr. as he strolls into the room. “What are you doing awake? It’s past your bedtime.”
“Don, I’m scared. I think there’s a boogeyman in the closet,” the normally clueless Eric responds, for once showing a bit of awareness. But the show’s Trump Jr. ignores him.
“Eric, there’s no boogeyman in your closet. Have you been watching the news again?” the show’s Trump Jr. tells Eric, as the younger son clings to that stuffed shark for dear life.
It eventually comes out that Eric is worried because he heard on the news that Trump Jr. might be indicted. His older brother laughs at the notion, generally just being impressed that Eric knows what the world ‘indicted’ means. Naturally, he isn’t actually familiar with the word.
“Indict. There’s no sugar indict Coke,” Eric says, mistaking the world “indict” for “in diet.”
The blows don’t stop there. Later in the sketch, the show’s Eric says, “Mr. Mueller, people say you’re the worst thing to ever happen to my dad.”
“Nooooooo Eric,” SNL’s Mueller responds. “Getting elected president was the worst thing that ever happened to your dad.”
While the sketch was funny enough, it did heavily rely on two features that have been criticized in the Trump era: A reliance on both guest stars and tired bits.
For a couple weeks this season, the show didn’t have any celebrity guest stars. It was forced to draw from its own cast, which led to takes on the Fox News show “The Ingraham Angle” for two consecutive weeks, with Kate McKinnon playing Laura Ingraham. This allowed the show to essentially sort through various news headlines through the lens of Ingraham and other Fox News regulars.
Last week, however, marked a return to guest stars when Baldwin, Ben Stiller and Fred Armisen all appeared in the cold open — which, natch, was a skewering of Trump and his relationship with Vladimir Putin, among others. This week continued that trend.
Last year, the show came under a lot of fire for its reliance on guest stars, making their return somewhat notable.
Meanwhile, the sketch relied (again) on Moffat and Day’s (hilarious) sendup of the Trump brothers. They started out as Weekend Update guests, so the move to cold open signals a certain trust in the impressions, though there exists a cynical take that the show is simply out of ideas and needs to recycle its jokes.
The only thing that we can be sure of is that next week’s cold open will likely feature someone connected to Trump. Who that is probably depends on how big of a guest the show can call in.
Robert De Niro made a surprise appearance as special counsel Robert Mueller in “Saturday Night Live’s” cold open.
De Niro popped out of a closet in a sketch that skewered President Donald Trump and the mounting legal pressure Mueller’s investigation has put on many of Trump’s associates. Alex Moffatt played Eric Trump in a bedtime-story setting, with Mikey Day as Donald Trump Jr. delivering a reading to his brother of “Twas the Night Before Christmas.”
De Niro’s Mueller showed up, as “the boogeyman in the closet,” to pressure Eric Trump into participating with his investigation into the 2016 presidential campaign and allegations of collusion with Russia among members of Trump’s campaign staff.
“It’s just me, Robert Mueller, your dad’s friend from work,” De Niro’s Mueller told Moffatt’s Eric Trump.
(Excerpt) Read more in: The Washington Post