Not the best bit of self-criticism they’ve done since the election (these two skits about the liberal bubble are better) but worth a watch to start the week. It’s a rare case of the show targeting both sides politically in the same segment. Part of the gag is a cuddly pug holding beliefs that the writers and most of the audience consider abhorrent, but the pro-Trump case is made in such a straightforward way that the exaggerated horror among the scientists becomes the punchline. He likes Trump, but he likes him for sympathetic reasons — he can’t be bought by Wall Street, we can’t afford more business as usual in D.C., etc. And the people around him, saturated in professional-class groupthink, are mortified.

The way this got written, I assume, was one of the writers having a friend who supports Trump and wrestling with how much that should bother him. It’s an absurd take on those equally absurd pieces written last November after the election about how a properly woke liberal should engage with Trump-supporting relatives at Thanksgiving. Be polite? Be aggressive? Avoid politics? Skip dinner entirely? This is SNL reckoning with the possibility that Trumpers are people too — almost — and that there’s more to friendship than politics.