‘Saturday Night Live’ Opens With Donald Trump Comparing Himself To The Messiah — “Because Of The Mess I, Ah, Made Out Of The Economy”

Saturday Night Live went with an Easter-themed opener, this time with Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) comparing himself to the son of God.

“You know, many people are even calling me the Messiah — because of the mess I, ah, made out of the economy,” Johnson as Trump said.

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“Or because of my beautiful tariffs — so beautiful — they were working so well that I had to stop them.”

The riff was on Trump’s partial pullback on a key economy priority — blanket tariffs — after the bond markets signaled that the U.S. economy was about to fall off a cliff. The stock market soured when Trump put them on pause, but stocks sank again out of concern over the 145% tariffs on key trading partner China.

The sketch opened with Mikey Day as Jesus, recreating the scene from the Bible in which Christ visits the temple and gets enraged at seeing money changers transacting business within its walls.

“This will not stand. I will rid this place of all its money,” Jesus said.

Then, Trump entered.

“Remind you of anyone?” Trump said. “I also got rid of money last week, but instead of one temple, I did a whole country.”

This was the second week in a row that the show spoofed Trump’s tariff, as Johnson appeared in the opener last week to satirize the president’s rollout of the new policy.

By then, the markets already had taken a nosedive. This week, Trump and his team insisted that they would not back down from the tariffs. But by Wednesday, the president did, announcing on Truth Social that there would be the 90-day pause. But concerns remain over a protracted trade war with China. Earlier today came the news that iPhones and other computer products would be exempt from the policy.

“We had to stop,” Johnson’s Trump explained. “But now everything is back exactly how it was, minus a few trillion dollars and an historic transfer of wealth from the middle class to my buddies.”

The skit also mocked Trump’s loose embrace of religion.

“Today is the first day of Passover for our Jewish friends, and we call it Passover because it’s when we pass right over the little kosher section in the grocery store. We go straight to that Easter candy. Fish in a jar? No thanks, I want a Peep.”

He added, “We love Easter. We love bunny. We love hunting for eggs — just like everyone’s doing in the grocery store right now, because they cost a billion, trillion dollars. But I thought that was what the whole campaign was about, but I just can’t crack it. Egg joke, here we go.”

“We are looking forward to Easter Mass, definitely,” he went on. “Easter Mass is always packed, right? You know, it’s sad. Some people only go to church on Christmas and Easter. Not me. I don’t go on those days either.”

Johnson broke the fourth wall in the sketch, as he pointed out Emil Wakim, standing next to Day, and said, “He thinks he should be playing Jesus. He was telling everyone backstage, ‘You know, the real Jesus would have looked like me. IRL. But we don’t like to think about that so we have Mikey Day there, with his big beautiful blue eyes!”

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