Donald Trump might claim he can’t tolerate Saturday Night Live, but one recurring character appears to live in his head rent-free. The former president perked up the ears of SNL fans Tuesday morning with a reference to a mid-‘80s character—one he’s invoked multiple times over the past decade.
Sitting down for a Cabinet meeting where Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other administration officials briefed him on the catastrophic flooding that has killed more than 100 people in Texas, Trump abruptly turned his attention to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had blamed the disaster on the president’s leadership.
“I saw him say, it’s Trump’s fault,” the president told reporters. “‘Yeah, yeah, that’s right. It’s Trump’s fault.’ He was actually—did you ever see Jon Lovitz, The Liar? Where he goes, ‘Yeah, yeah, I went to Harvard. That’s right.’ Because this was Schumer.”
Trump, of course, was referencing Lovitz’s pathological liar character, Tommy Flanagan.
The remark drew chuckles from Trump’s Cabinet members, but it’s far from the first time he’s impersonated the character while lashing out at political opponents.
“I’m just an innocent person sitting watching television, as I’ve been doing,” Trump said at a campaign press conference in 2016, recalling an interview he’d seen with Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook.
That time, it was Mook whom Trump compared to Flanagan. Over the years, Trump has again conjured Lovitz’s ‘The Liar’ (as he refers to the character) when attacking both Senator Dianne Feinstein and investigators in Georgia probing the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.
He’s even trotted out the reference in writing. In a Truth Social post last year, Trump attempted to discredit Judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over his $355 million civil fraud case. Trump wrote that Engoron’s valuation was pulled “out of THIN AIR… reminiscent of John Lovitz, ‘The Liar,’ on SNL when it was good.”
Oddly, none of Trump’s nods to Tommy Flanagan have included the line “That’s the ticket!,” the character’s signature catchphrase.
The self-proclaimed president of Pathological Liars Anonymous, Flanagan was part of Lovitz’s comedy repertoire even before he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live. The character debuted on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1985. Lovitz joined SNL later that year, and The Pathological Liar made his first SNL appearance in just Lovitz’s second episode. He would go on to reprise the character 18 more times on the show.
Lovitz himself—who has been a vocal supporter of Trump’s stance on Israel—has mostly stayed quiet on the president’s repeated takes on Flanagan. He did, however, post video of Trump’s 2016 impression with the caption, “This just happened! I’m blown away!!!!“
As for those who might see irony in a man who made 30,573 documented false or misleading claims during his first presidential term taking such pleasure in “The Liar”—well… enjoy?
A collection of Trump’s takes on Tommy Flanagan can be seen at the top of this post.
