‘SNL’: Alec Baldwin Returns to Mock President Trump’s Emergency Declaration

Alec Baldwin returned to Saturday Night Live this weekend to play President Donald Trump in a sketch mocking Trump’s national emergency declaration to get a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border built.

In the cold open, Baldwin got right down to business to make fun of Trump.

“We have a tremendous amount of drugs flowing into this country from the southern border, or the brown line as many people have asked me not to call it,” Baldwin said.

“That’s why we need wall, because wall works. Wall makes safe,” he continued. “You don’t have to be smart to understand that.”

“So you all see why I have to fake this national emergency, right? I have to because I want to,” Baldwin said. “It’s really simple. We have a problem. Drugs are coming into this country through no wall.”

During the Q&A portion of the sketch, Baldwin’s Trump admitted he would have told Russian President Vladimir Putin to let Hillary Clinton become president if he knew how hard being president was.

This was Baldwin’s first appearance on the show as Trump since the Jan. 19 episode, which came while the partial government shutdown was still ongoing. Baldwin’s Trump appeared on Deal or No Deal, where he refused every deal presented to re-open the government before finally taking a deal from a Clemson student played by Pete Davidson for “hamberders.”

On Friday, the president held a press conference at the White House Rose Garden to announce a national emergency after Congress passed a bill to avoid another government shutdown that did not include funding for the wall.

“We have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people and it’s unacceptable,” Trump told reporters Friday. “And by signing the national emergency, something signed many times by other presidents, many, many times — President Obama, in fact — we may be using one of the national emergencies that he signed having to do with cartels, criminal cartels. It’s a very good emergency that he signed. And we’re going to use parts of it on our dealings on cartels. So that would be a second national emergency.”

Trump said what his administration wants to do is “simple,” adding, “We want to stop drugs from coming into our country. We want to stop criminals and gangs from coming into our country. Nobody has done the job that we have ever done.”

Later in his speech Trump admitted the declaration will be met with challenges in the courts.

“We will then be sued, and they will sue us in the Ninth Circuit, even though it shouldn’t be there, and we will possibly get a bad ruling and then we will get another bad ruling, and then we will end up in the Supreme Court, and hopefully we will get a fair shake and win in the Supreme Court, just like the ban,” Trump said, referring to the legal challenges his controversial immigration rules faced. “They sued us in the Ninth Circuit, and we lost, and then we lost in the appellate division, and then we went to the Supreme Court and we won.”

During the Q&A portion of the event, Trump told NBC News‘ Peter Alexander he did not need to make the declaration, but just wanted to get the wall built faster.

“I got almost $1.4 billion when I wasn’t supposed to get one dollar,” Trump said, referring to the border security measures in the new budget that allow for 55 miles of new fencing. “Well, I got $1.4 billion, but I’m not happy with it…I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.”

New episodes of Saturday Night Live air at 11:30 p.m. ET on NBC.

Photo credit: NBC