This biggest news this week wasn’t that President Donald J. Trump believed noted autocratic maniac Kim Jong Un when he said he had nothing to do with the murder of American Otto Warmbier. It was the Michael Cohen testimony, in which the commander-in-chief’s prison-bound former lawyer offered few new horrific insights into his old boss that we either knew already or at least strongly suspected.
And so Ben Stiller — having played Cohen back around the time he was about to be sentenced for his long tenure as Trump’s 3 a.m. man — returned to duty. He spent the first half of the sketch reading a much shorter version of the real guy’s opening remarks, which Stiller’s Cohen said he mostly wrote himself, but that he “had some help from the guys who wrote Green Book.”
First off, he had to convince the House Oversight Committee that he wouldn’t lie under oath again. “This time I, like really mean it,” he said. He then got to the red meat. “I’m here today to tell you that Mr. Trump is a racist.” When his big revelation received crickets, he responded, “Wow, I thought that would be a bigger reaction.”
He offered up some damning documents — including a letter to Trump’s high school, forbidding them from releasing his SAT scores via a crude cartoon — but quickly rounding things down. “In conclusion, I know what I did was wrong. I know that because I got caught.” He then quoted Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn,” as one does.
With Cohen’s intro out of the way, it was time for the guests. Vet Bill Hader returned to the show to play Jim Jordan, the hopping mad representative who appeared to win the contest of which Republican could be the angriest. “I’m so angry at you I didn’t wear a jacket,” he huffed.
There was also Kate McKinnon as a mellow, Noo Yawk-accented Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Kyle Mooney as a sputtering Paul Gosar, and Alex Moffat as Mark Meadows, the Republican who dared to bring on a single black Trump employee (Ego Nwodim) as proof that he wasn’t racist. Then he called her “Omarosa.”
