Saturday Night Live turned the “SNL Oval Office” moment into a catch-all cold open on Saturday, November 8, 2025, with James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump stepping over a collapsing visitor to deliver a sweeping monologue about shutdown chaos, grocery prices, Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral victory, and the latest White House spectacle. “Each week, I like to create a big visual that sort of sums up how things are going,” Johnson’s Trump said—before turning the incident into exactly that visual.

What happened in the “SNL Oval Office” cold open

The opener staged an Oval Office press conference that’s upended when a pharmaceutical executive (played by Jeremy Culhane) faints. Rather than help, Trump (Johnson) addresses the camera and reframes the room’s panic as political theater. “O

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