The "Saturday Night Live" season 42 premier this week cold-opened with a highly anticipated take on the first presidential debate. Saturday night was also an opportunity for Alec Baldwin to showcase his Donald Trump impersonation — complete with incessant sniffling.
Returning cast member Kate McKinnon, of course, portrayed Hillary Clinton.
"I'm better than ever," McKinnon-as-Clinton said, taking the stage coughing and with a cane before performing a somersault. "Let's do this."
"I am going to be so good tonight," Baldwin-as-Trump — whose profile looked spookily similar to the real estate mogul — promised. "I am going to be so calm and so presidential that all of you watching are going to cream your jeans."
"Hey, jazzman," he later said, referring to "Weekend Update" co-host Michael Che, who — absent Jay Pharoah — played moderator Lester Holt. "Our jobs are fleeing this country. They're going to Mexico, they're going to China [the "Ch" pronounced as a j-sound]. I would stop that. If Hillary knew how, she would've done it already. Period. End of story. I won the debate, I stayed calm, just like I promised and it is over. Goodnight, Hofstra."
Reminded there's still 88 minutes left in the 90-minute debate, Baldwin-as-Trump went for broke.
"My microphone is broken," he said. "She (Clinton) broke it with Obama. She and Obama stole my microphone and took it to Kenya and they broke it now it's broken."
"SNL" was criticized last season for humanizing the Republican presidential nominee, who guest hosted a truly awful episode in which he danced and sang to a parody of Drake's "Hotline Bling." More recently, Jimmy Fallon — host of the Lorne Michaels-produced "Tonight Show" — was similarly panned for mussing Trump's hair in an interview last month.
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