While last week’s cold open focused on a local news story — the New York City mayoral election — Saturday Night Live took the action back to D.C. for the opener to Nikki Glaser’s November 8 episode. “Oval Office Press Conference Cold Open” didn’t any feature celebrity cameos, but it did largely recreate real events that occurred in the Oval Office on November 6. And it riffed on a viral photo of Donald Trump amid the medical hubbub next to him.
As in real life, the meeting in question was televised live, and involved Trump welcoming pharmaceutical executives from the companies behind weight loss GLP1 drugs Wegovy and Zepbound to announce a price deal. But one of the men present passed out and fell to the ground partway into the press conference, and needed medical attention. While Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, was seen on camera asking whether he needed help, U.S. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. also drew attention online for quickly exiting the scene.
“Oh, hi! Didn’t see you there. Someone was dying in my office,” Donald Trump(James Austin Johnson) said in SNL‘s reenactment, after the man (Jeremy Culhane) went down. “I think I’m playing this very normal. Just stand there and stare like a sociopath. Didn’t even pretend like I was gonna help. Like when someone drops something and you do the the fake bend, you know? ‘Oh, here, let me help you pick that up. Oh, you got it? Oh, you got it, oh.'”
SNL‘s November 8 cold open poked fun at Trump, RFK Jr.’s reactions to a man fainting
“And how about RFK, huh? Booked it out of here like someone was trying to give him a vaccine,” Johnson’s Trump said of RFK Jr.’s leaving immediately. “Brainworm, take the wheel! That thing kind of Ratatouille’d him right out of the room.” (An unnamed insider claimed to People that Kennedy wasn’t running away, but “went into the other room and got a chair because when [the man] first started falling, he thought maybe he just needed to sit.”)
“Each week, I like to create a big visual that sort of sums up how things are going,” Trump continued. “Last week, it was the demolishing of the East Wing. This week, it’s a medical professional almost dying in my Oval Office at the mere thought of charging less for drugs.”
James Austin Johnson dressed as Donald Trump watching other men catch someone as they faint.
While he went on to lament Mamdani’s historic landslide mayoral victory, he made reference to the president’s current battle to stop the release of SNAP contingency funds to feed Americans despite a court order. “But our side had some wins this week, too. Supreme Court said we could stop feeding poor people. You can clap for that. SNAP!”
“And people are saying, ‘But, sir, how will I afford my Thanksgiving turkey for my family?’ Well, good news is your family’s not coming because all the planes are gone. We call that problem-solving problem,” he explained.