It was ten years ago today—on November 7, 2015—that Donald Trump, then one in a crowded field of Republican presidential hopefuls, strode onto the stage of Studio 8H as host of Saturday Night Live.
The decision to have him host was controversial from the start.
Trump had built his political profile on falsehoods—chief among them, the “birther” lie about Barack Obama—and had launched his campaign with attacks on Mexican immigrants. That SNL (and NBC, which had by then broken ties with its one-time Apprentice host over his racist statements) would platform him on television comedy’s biggest stage struck many as a cynical ratings ploy, one that seemed to value spectacle over judgment.
Outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Latino-advocacy groups and civil rights organizations gathered in protest, accusing SNL and its parent network of lending legitimacy to a candidate trafficking in xenophobia. Inside, some of the show’s cast members and writers apparently agreed.
Taran Killam, then an SNL repertory player, would later call the show’s embrace of Trump “embarrassing and shameful,” adding that those protesting outside “were absolutely right.”
The episode itself landed with a thud. Critics called it “bland,” “toothless,” and “an anemic, halfhearted dud.” The next day, Trump told reporters that he’d personally vetoed sketches he felt “went a little bit too far.”
In the months and years that followed, the episode would take on a kind of uneasy afterlife—viewed, in retrospect, as an early milestone in the normalization of Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, and television’s complicity in that process.
Amid a second Trump term that has seen presidential norms pushed to new extremes, LateNighter set out to learn more about what viewers didn’t see that night: the sketches written—and in some cases rehearsed—but ultimately scrapped during that fraught November week.
The details, drawn from multiple sources, offer more than just a glimpse at alternate directions the now-infamous episode might have gone, but also a snapshot of the creative dissonance that came to define it.
As with any episode, dozens of sketches were drafted that week, each one vying for airtime. While Trump boasted of his role vetting the material, the process wasn’t any different from most other weeks, with the show’s production and writing teams making most of the creative decisions, with input from the host.
The Real Estate Deal
Set in 1626, this proposed sketch imagined Trump’s trademark dealmaking instincts—and his reputation as a less-than-honest broker—at work centuries earlier, casting him as the man behind Dutch settler Peter Minuit’s “purchase” of Manhattan from the indigenous Lenape people.
Taran Killam was to play Minuit, Kyle Mooney was to appear as Lenape Chief Seyseys, while Trump was to portray an overconfident merchant determined to drive down the price.
“Twenty-two dollars,” he insisted in the sketch, calling the island “a dump” and “a risky investment.” Trump’s character eventually upped his offer to twenty-four dollars, assuring the Lenape that the Dutch would preserve Manhattan’s natural beauty—a place of wooded hills, meadows, and roaming wildlife. But once the deal was struck, he immediately broke his promise, turning to Killam to declare, “We need to start cutting these trees down—like, yesterday.”
A Message From SNL
In her biography of Lorne Michaels, Susan Morrison writes that Tim Robinson, then a writer on the show, was among those most frustrated by Michaels’ handling of Trump, quoting him at one point saying, “Lorne has lost his f**king mind and someone needs to shoot him in the back of the head.”
That frustration appeared to surface in this sketch Robinson co-wrote with Zach Kanin (who would later co-create Detroiters, I Think You Should Leave, and The Chair Company with Robinson).
Framed as a mock public service announcement, the piece opened with a group of cast members delivering a straight-faced statement addressing the controversy around Trump’s appearance. They assured viewers that SNL didn’t pick hosts based on politics, only on “cultural relevance,” before their rhetoric gradually morphed into Trump’s own campaign language.
The sketch ended with Lorne Michaels entering as himself to defend his sensitivity to Hispanic viewers, citing his 1986 film Three Amigos as proof of his love and respect for Mexicans.
The sketch did not make it past the show’s Wednesday read-through.
The Panic Room
Among several proposed sketches that cast Trump in “weirdo” roles, this one imagined him as a jumpy caterer at an upscale housewarming party who mistakes a spilled glass of red wine for a violent attack—and barricades himself inside the hosts’ panic room.
“There’s a killer stabbing people!” he was to shout before disappearing into the high-tech shelter, refusing to open the door.
As the sketch escalated, Trump’s caterer was to unleash pepper spray on the guests from inside the sealed room while snacking on a Hot Pocket from the panic room’s emergency stash. In the end, he was to emerge from the room clad in a bulletproof vest, holding the Hot Pocket and a crossbow.
The Giving Tree
In one of the most talked-about sketches to never air on Saturday Night Live, “The Giving Tree” reimagined Shel Silverstein’s classic children’s story as a parable about bad business instincts. Trump was to play a neighboring tree who mocks the selfless title character, played by Aidy Bryant, for giving away everything to a boy who only takes.
The sketch followed the arc of the original book. Each time the boy returned to take more from the tree—her apples, her branches, her trunk—Trump’s tree interjected from the sidelines, incredulous at her generosity. “You are getting screwed in this deal, lady,” he told her.
Though the sketch made it to dress rehearsal, it was cut before air. Susan Morrison writes in her Lorne Michaels biography that Trump refused to perform the sketch—not because it made him appear heartless, but because he thought the tree costume made him look like “a loser.”
Hall of Presidents
Set in the then-futuristic year of 2025, Trump was cast as a suburban dad visiting Disney World with his daughter Ivanka, who had agreed to appear on the show. When the curtain rose on the attraction, the animatronic presidents began to introduce themselves—until the Trump robot, played by Taran Killam, interrupted to proclaim himself the greatest of them all.
From there, the robotic Trump sparred with the other presidents while the real Trump, sitting in the audience, cheered him on. The sketch closed with Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton, discovered lurking among the animatronic presidents until a park employee gently escorted her out.
Donald Trump’s Hair
Once an SNL writer, always an SNL writer? Al Franken, then a sitting U.S. Senator, called Lorne Michaels with an idea for that week’s episode: a sketch that imagined Trump’s hair as a vast, miniature construction site tended by shrunken engineers.
Pete Davidson was cast to play one of the workers toiling long hours beneath Trump’s golden strands. “It’s a ten-hour day,” Davidson’s engineer reportedly said in an early draft of the sketch, “but I can’t complain. My buddy works up front in Bangs—he hasn’t seen his wife in a year.”
The sketch was later reworked to focus on an elite group of defense department operatives known as “Scalp Team 6,” who are miniaturized to help protect Donald Trump’s hair for a windy meeting with Vladimir Putin.
Though it made it as far as dress rehearsal, the piece was ultimately cut before air, later appearing on YouTube as a “cut for time” sketch (below). Franken’s behind-the-scenes role, which he has confirmed to LateNighter, went unreported until now.
Focus Group
Also previously unreported: the I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson role that would later make 85-year-old character actor Ruben Rabasa a cult comedy hero was first pitched to Donald Trump—on Saturday Night Live.
As first conceived by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, Trump would have played the unhinged focus-group participant who wins over the room with bizarre tangents about steering wheels flying out of car windows.
Three years after SNL passed on the idea, it found new life on Robinson’s Netflix series, where Rabasa’s turn as the deranged panelist (“Who’s the most popular now, Paul?”) became a viral sensation. The sketch went on to earn the top spot in Rolling Stone’s ranking of every sketch featured on I Think You Should Leave.
The Pete Davidson Show
Just a year into his eight-season run on the SNL cast, Pete Davidson played a version of himself in this loose, stoner-talk-show spoof that cast Trump as himself.
In a moment played for laughs but that doesn’t seem entirely out of the realm of possibility, Davidson was to grin at one point and say to Trump, “Ivanka. Dude”—to which the billionaire businessman was to give him a fist bump. A version of the sketch was performed at dress rehearsal but was ultimately cut before airtime.
Donald Trump’s Crepe Escape
The legend of “Donald Trump’s House of Wings,” a sketch starring Trump from his first SNL hosting stint in 2004, has only grown in the years since he won the presidency. Had things gone another way, that original sketch—which featured Trump hawking his New Jersey chicken wing spot—would have received a sequel in 2015.
The proposed follow-up sketch, “Donald Trump’s Crepe Escape,” more or less followed the format of the original, with Trump extolling the virtues of his new strip mall crepe joint while a crew of beret-clad singers entered and exited the frame to perform a jingle—this time not to the Pointer Sisters’ “Jump (For My Love),” but to an entirely different “Jump”: the 1992 hit by rap duo Kris Kross.
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