Colin Jost skewered President Donald Trump‘s new section of border wall in SNL‘s Weekend Update segment.
As usual, Jost and Michael Che tackled the big news stories of the week in their news desk-style segment on Saturday Night Live. That included the president’s televised trip to Calexico, California where he inspected just over two miles of replacement border fencing. President Trump described the barrier as “anti-climb,” a distinction that Jost found a lot of humor in.
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“If you want to climb that, you deserve whatever you can get,” the president said. “But it’s a very, very hard — it’s meant to anti-climb, it’s called anti-climb.”
“Yeah, somehow I don’t think it’s called anti-climb,” Jost said after pausing for laughs. As he continued, the image over his shoulder changed to an indoor rock climbing wall with hand-holds built in.
“Trump’s like: ‘well, we started with a wall that was climb, but then we took away the handy-holds and the footy-woots and now it’s anti-climb,’” he said, and the wall in in the graphic changed so that it was just covered in peg holes.
Jost played another clip that ended with the president saying “m’kay?” in a lilting tone. The host laughed again, suggesting that even the president was getting fatigued by this endless debate over border security.
“That’s great. Trump is describing the wall like he’s a hungover tour guide, trying to get through it,” he said. “‘Okay, yeah, so we got the Statue of Liberty. She’s big, she’s green and she’s holding a little light, which I call anti-dark.’”
While Jost and the audience laughed, the replacement fencing and the president’s tour there have been a contentious story this week. According to a report by The Daily Mail, the new fencing replaces an existing barrier in the same place. So far, the Trump administration has not constructed barriers in any places that weren’t already covered on election day.
Still, the Trump administration claims that this new section is the beginning of 400 miles of new border wall that will go up over the course of the next two years. The barriers are the reinforced steel slats that the president has voiced his support for. Protesters on the scene floated a balloon resembling a cartoonish “baby Trump” over the wall on Friday.
So far, the president has not responded to SNL‘s mockery this weekend, though as usual the skit has viewers divided. Saturday Night Live airs every weekend at 11:30 p.m. ET on NBC.
