When Donald Trump was indicted last week, it didn’t cause his die-hard followers to wake up and jump ship. Quite the opposite. As predicted, it energized the MAGA wing of the GOP. One of his more prominent disciples, Marjorie Taylor Greene, even compared him to both Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ. (She wasn’t the first to do so.) After all, they were arrested, too. In so doing, she handed the SNL writing team an Easter gift.
The latest episode kicked off with an Easter special, featuring Mikey Day as Jesus, recreating the Last Supper with his disciples. At one point, Day’s Jesus declares that he has “committed no crime” and predicted that he will be “arrested, tried, and found guilty.”
“Sound familiar?” says James Austin Johnson’s Trump as he interrupts the recreation to find similarities, no matter how blasphemous, between himself and the son of God, who he describes as a “famous, wonderful man arrested for no reason at all.” He then made his point all the more clear, saying, “If you haven’t put it together folks, I’ve compared myself to Jesus, again.”
He added, “And what better time than on his birthday, Easter.”
A lot of SNL’s Trump sketches go far into absurdism, but this one — one of their better digs at the former president — actually sounds eerily close to something he’d really say at his rallies, when he goes way off-script and says things that should offend his evangelical base — but don’t.
For instance, while comparing himself to Christ, he couldn’t help but claim he was better. “He rose from the dead on the third day. “I would have done it faster,” he said. He then called Jesus a “nepo baby,” of course ignoring that he is, too.
Trump did find another point of comparison between himself and Jesus, one that he wouldn’t admit out loud because it would be self-incriminating, saying that “just like Jesus, all I did was be friendly to a sex worker and now they want to put me in jail.”
You can watch the sketch in the video above.