The latest SNL cold open was basically just James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump rambling to camera for five straight minutes, and it was brutal in that perfectly familiar, meandering way. Set up as a special holiday address, “President” Trump bragged about his administration’s “total transparency” on the Jeffrey Epstein documents while literally showing pages that were almost completely blacked out. At one point, he holds up a giant file where the only visible words are “Trump Didn’t Do Nothing Bad,” treating that as proof the whole thing clears him.
SNL Cold Open, Trump, And The Epstein Files
The SNL cold open leans hard into how heavily redacted the newly released Epstein files are, with Trump joking that everything important is blacked out but insisting that means he looks “very good.” Johnson’s Trump riffs that Epstein was “a terrible man, I didn’t know him, and I liked him a lot,” mocking how the real Trump has tried to distance himself while photos and references keep surfacing. The sketch also nods to Trump’s claim that his White House is the “most transparent in history,” cutting that down by showing page after page of absurdly censored documents.
Later, he explains why his name is suddenly on so many monuments and buildings in D.C., saying they “had to take it off so many files” once the Epstein material got redacted, so they just slapped “Trump” onto architecture instead. That joke feeds directly into the bigger gag about him rebranding the capital while quietly trying to erase his name from anything Epstein-related.
SNL Skewers Trump’s Kennedy Center Rebrand
Another big target in the SNL cold open is Trump’s push to slap his name on the Kennedy Center. Johnson’s Trump announces that the venue will now be called “The Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” leaning into his habit of renaming things after himself. In one version of the joke, he reels off a list of imaginary rebrands like the “Trump-Washington Monument” and “Trump Lincoln Memorial,” with mocked-up images showing classic landmarks defaced with his gold branding.
The Kennedy Center bit ties back into the Epstein material too, as Trump jokes that if people are wondering why his name is suddenly on so many buildings, it is because they had to yank “Trump” off “so many files” once the Epstein documents were scrubbed. It’s a clean, vicious loop: the sketch paints all his new naming obsessions as a side effect of trying to escape the political fallout of those files.
Why This SNL Cold Open Is Blowing Up
Online, the reaction has latched onto how far the SNL cold open went with the Epstein joke pages and the Kennedy Center rename, especially because Trump is currently president again and the Epstein releases are actually in the news cycle. Clips of Johnson reading out lines like “We released all the files and I come out looking, frankly, very good” over pages of black bars are doing big numbers on X and TikTok, because it nails both his style and the surreal reality of the redactions.
Critics have pointed out that this isn’t the first time SNL has used a cold open to go after Trump over Epstein photos, emails, or files, but this one is more focused and more brutal because it traps him in a one-man address with no one else to cut away to. And with Ariana Grande hosting and it reportedly being the Christmas episode that also marked Bowen Yang’s final show, the cold open felt like SNL choosing to end the year with one sharp, concentrated shot at Trump’s latest Epstein spin.
