The show found an ideal vehicle for satirizing the country’s economic anxiety.
Holland Rainwater / NBC
April 13, 2025, 12:53 PM ET
Last night’s Saturday Night Live had tariffs on the brain.
Multiple sketches tackled the same topic that has preoccupied much of the country this week: the economic instability brought on by President Donald Trump’s imposition of sweeping global tariffs (which he then paused on countries that aren’t China for 90 days). SNL explored the subject in several different ways; some were more genuinely amusing than others, but all captured the anxiety many Americans are feeling, across class lines. Even the musical guest, Lizzo, wore a shirt that read Tariffied during her first number.
The theme first cropped up in the cold open, which began ostensibly as a sketch about Easter—specifically about Jesus expelling money changers during an act known as the cleansing of the temple. But just when Mikey Day, playing Jesus, tipped over a table, the scene paused and the cast froze. Then James Austin Johnson as Trump entered, breaking the fourth wall as a kind of meta-narrator: Commenting on the temple scene behind him, he cracked jokes about the cost of eggs while comparing the week’s stock-market chaos to the son of God’s death and resurrection (his sketch partners, still suspended, tried not to laugh).
But that was just one of the show’s riffs on the effects of the president’s trade war. The pretaped sketch “The White Potus” seamlessly parodied both the tariff news and the latest season of HBO’s The White Lotus, which concluded last week. In place of Timothy Ratliff, the North Carolina financier played by Jason Isaacs, who spirals upon realizing he’s lost all of his family’s money, “The White Potus” starred Johnson’s Trump, spiraling upon realizing he’d lost all of the country’s money. And instead of Timothy’s sons—the clueless Lochlan and the protein-shake-loving Saxon—the former SNL cast member Alex Moffat returned to play his childishly incompetent version of Eric Trump alongside Mikey Day’s Donald Trump Jr. Chloe Fineman played Melania with a southern accent, in a nod to Parker Posey’s Tar Heel–stumping matriarch, Victoria.
The White Lotus was a savvy vehicle for SNL’s writers. Leaning into the drama’s exploration of the physical and reputational protections of wealth, the sketch suggested that members of the Trump family and the administration—such as Marcello Hernandez’s Marco Rubio and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., played by the night’s host, Jon Hamm—operated in much the same way as the privileged Ratliff family. “We are so lucky that America will always be a rich and powerful nation,” Fineman’s Melania said. “I mean, can you imagine how awful it would be if America lost all its money and no one in the world respected us anymore?” Meanwhile, Johnson’s despondent Trump looked down at his phone to see the Newsmax headline “Trump Triggers Worldwide Recession.”
Perhaps SNL’s strongest foray into the mindset of average Americans was the sketch “Check to Check Business News,” in which Ego Nwodim and Hamm played anchors hosting a broadcast about the global trade battle. After Hamm’s newscaster explained that the Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq Composite were all down, he said, “Okay, does that mean anything to anyone?”
Nwodim’s character then explained it in terms that a person who might be less stock market–literate could comprehend. Staples like boxed mac and cheese and a “big-ass box of Bisquick” have become more expensive, as demonstrated by a series of cartoonish charts. “Candy bars are up from ‘Sure, baby’ to ‘Put that back,’” she said, channeling the frustration of a parent who can no longer afford to treat their kids.
The conceit elicited some of the night’s biggest chuckles because it grounded the alarm raised by the tariffs in a simple, relatable way. SNL can get a lot of mileage out of mocking Trump’s White House, but the sketch was a reminder that interpreting a big political story by way of a weekly grocery list makes it terrifyingly real.
