Turns out that crew of unnamed comedy writers aren’t the only late-night staffers working to help Democrats beat Donald Trump at the ballot box.
Saturday Night Live‘s Kenan Thompson made an appearance Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention, where he was the latest to take the stage to read selections from Project 2025.
Holding a bound version of the 920-page Republican blueprint for a second Trump presidency, Thompson asked the crowd at Chicago’s United Center, “You ever seen a document that can kill a small animal and Democracy at the same time? Here it is.”
He then proceeded to introduce a series of Americans whose freedoms would be curtailed by Project 2025, including an LGBTQ+ individual who said she’d been married to her wife for 8 years, a woman with diabetes who would see the price of insulin increase, an OB-GYN who would be jailed for performing abortions, and a civil servant who could be fired for not being a MAGA loyalist (never mind that she works for the Department of Education, which Project 2025 calls to eliminate).
Full Video: SNL's Kenan Thompson reads selections from Project 2025 Wednesday night at the DNC. "You ever seen a document that can kill a small animal and end democracy at the same time?” he asks. “Here it is.” #DNC2024 #SNL #Project2025 #DNC2024CHICAGO pic.twitter.com/mQNeCnrWnC
— LateNighter (@latenightercom) August 22, 2024
Thompson concluded by saying “There’s a bunch of stuff in here, but that’s all we have time for at the moment. Just remember, everything that we just talked about is very real.”
Donald Trump has claimed to have no association with Project 2025 and not to know who is behind it. Sources have connected the tome to more than 140 people who have worked for the former president.
Although Thompson is the first current SNL cast member to stump for a presidential candidate, he’s not the only late-night personality to openly take a stand in the election. Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and David Letterman have all hosted fundraisers for Kamala Harris and/or Joe Biden.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t expect SNL to continue to practice equal opportunity satire when it returns in late September. As Thompson himself told the Des Moines Register in 2016, “We’ll make fun of whoever. Everybody’s fair game, whether they’re on the right or the left.”
