“Saturday Night Live” took on Signalgate in its opening minutes, with a high school group chat that featured new haircuts, discussions of outfits and a .pdf of the location of all the United States’ nuclear submarines.
The group chat between cast members Ego Nwodim, Sarah Sherman and host Mikey Madison was interrupted by Pete Hegseth, who cut in to let the teenage girls know that a Yemen raid was a success.
“Tomahawks airborne 15 minutes ago. Who’s ready to glass some Houthi rebels? Flag emoji, flag emoji,” he said. “God bless the troops. Eggplant.”
Over the objections and confusion of the three girls, Andrew Dismukes’ take on the defense secretary added Vice President JD Vance to the chat.
Bowen Yang reprises his Vance role, calling in from Greenland for reasons that are a mystery even to him. Vance sneaks in a reference to “Severance” as he contemplates the absurdity of running errands for the erratic president.
“Nobody knows why I’m here, especially me,” Vance said. “But praise Trump — our work here is mysterious and important.”
The sketch’s cast of teens allowed “SNL” to get in one more shot at a long-gone associate of Donald Trump. Madison said she needed to get off the chat, as she was being picked up by former Florida lawmaker Matt Gaetz.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio joined the chat and, after sharing both the “real JFK files” and the identities of “all deep-cover CIA agents,” the group finally realized they were leaking state secrets to teens.
“In that case, we were totally pranking you guys,” Marcello Hernández as Rubio said. “But would you mind emailing your names and home addresses to Deportations@ICE.gov?”
Watch the whole sketch below:
