Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” team reported live from MSNBC’s perch at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, Wednesday night (July 21). The segment included a special appearance by SNL castmember Kate McKinnon, fresh off the premiere week of her new film Ghostbusters.
McKinnon, true to form, took the opportunity to break out a new impression—Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Or, as McKinnon put it, “a 15-pound, 200-year-old marionette.”
“Weekend Update” anchor Colin Jost riffed with McKinnon-as-Ginsburg about the justice’s recent, controversial remarks regarding Donald Trump, in which she called the Republican nominee “a faker,” and claimed, if her husband were alive, the pair would move to New Zealand should Trump win the White House.
“Trump tweeted out that your mind is shot,” Jost said. “Oh, please,” she replied. “Look, if my mind is shot, then Donald Trump’s mind is shot, stabbed, strangled, put in a vat of wet cement, and dumped in the Gowanus Canal. His mind is sleeping with the fishes, but it’s waking up to a Ginsburn.”
“I rode here on a dog,” she told Jost, remarking on the justice’s famous diminutiveness. “And his name is Mike Pence.”
When Jost brought up the prospect of a president Trump nominating New Jersey governor Chris Christie to the Supreme Court, alongside Ginsburg, she gasped, “Chris Christie on the Supreme Court? I’d rather have an empty chair than a broken chair.”
Here’s hoping justice Ginsburg doesn’t retire anytime soon, not with arguably one of McKinnon’s best impressions just in its nascence. America needs, at the very least, a weekly Ginsburn on “Weekend Update.”