SNL bids a pre-emptive farewell to Trump with 'Hallelujah'

Saturday Night Live
(Image credit: NBC/Screenshot)

Saturday Night Live opened its 42nd season finale, hosted by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, with a reprise of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," the song the show used to mourn Hillary Clinton's election loss. This time around, Alec Baldwin's President Trump was the one at the piano, wearing a Russian flag pin to reference the scandals many believe will end his presidency well before 2020.

As Trump sings, he is gradually joined by the rest of his SNL administration: Kate McKinnon as spin doctor Kellyanne Conway, Beck Bennett as Vice President Pence, and even Scarlett Johansson in a cameo reprisal of her role as Ivanka Trump to round out the First Family. "I'm not giving up because I didn't do anything wrong," Trump says at the end of the song. "But I can't speak for these people."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.