Matt Damon Jokes Trump Gets Third Term on SNL Cold Open — Snl Cold Open
Matt Damon turned the snl cold open into a political sketch on Saturday night, playing Brett Kavanaugh and joking that Donald Trump would get a third term. The appearance was his third time hosting Saturday Night Live, and it came after a little over seven years away from the show.
Damon’s return mattered because the episode put him back in the center of SNL’s live political satire while he was also using the monologue to push The Odyssey, due in theaters on July 17. That gave the show a clear commercial hook: a movie star with a summer release using prime-time comedy to stay in the conversation.
Kavanaugh Meets Hegseth
Colin Jost played Pete Hegseth in the cold open, and the two Trump-backed officials met up at a bar before talking like men riding a winning streak. Hegseth bragged, “Can you believe I just like started a war?” and Kavanaugh answered, “Can you believe I ended abortion? Your body, my choice,” before the sketch turned to the ongoing Iran war.
Kavanaugh then steered the bit into a different kind of fight, saying, “the real war right now is the war against male loneliness.” That line pushed the sketch away from pure policy parody and toward the sort of grievance comedy SNL uses when it wants the joke to land as cultural satire, not just political imitation.
Aziz Ansari Returns
Aziz Ansari made a surprise cameo as Kash Patel, his second pop-up in as many weeks after appearing during the previous episode. Patel opened with, “Does this bar take cash?” then asked, “So, what’s up? Are we wilding out tonight, or what?” before adding, “Seriously, we’re all living the American dream. I’m the first person in my family to go to college parties many years after graduating.”
The cameo gave the cold open another recognizable face without expanding the cast list on the page, and it also set up the punch line that drove the sketch to its close. Kavanaugh told the room, “We’re gonna let Trump do a third term,” Hegseth replied, “I thought that was unconstitutional,” and Kavanaugh finished with, “Yeah, it was,” followed by, “But Trump found the original Constitution and at the end he wrote, ‘Sike!'”
Damon joined the three-timers club on Saturday night, which is the neat business-like takeaway for SNL: the show still uses major names to front-load its biggest political sketches, and Damon still knows how to sell them. With The Odyssey set for July 17, this return kept him visible in front of a broad audience before the film’s summer run begins.
