Robert Mueller Terrorizes Eric Trump in the SNL Cold Open
Over the last few years, the SNL cast has making their Trump White House characters weirder and weirder. By now, Mikey Day and Alex Moffat have slowly morphed their Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump impressions from a pair of pampered dullard businessboys into a more of a caregiver dynamic, with Eric so perennially dumb and child-like that Donald Jr. needs to hold his hand through everything. It's maybe too nice an interpretation of Donald Jr., a man struggling to make it as a professional troll, but it gives Moffat some fun material to work with as Donald Trump's second least favorite son.
In Saturday's cold open, they squeeze in some good one-liners, mostly around Eric trying to prove he knows basic vocabulary words, like "indict," for example: "There is no sugar 'indict' Coke." And the shtick is also solid, with Eric terrified of Robert Mueller (played again by Robert DeNiro) hiding in his closet. But there may be some good potential in future sketches with Eric and a maybe-imaginary Robert Mueller, a la Calvin & Hobbes:
Eric Trump: No one knows the full story yet. You saw what I put out, it's all been heavily redacted. Do you know what redacted is?
Robert Mueller: Uh-huh. Like when my dad called Jeff Sessions "mentally redacted."
Eric Trump: Yeah, that was fun.
The whole sketch is a little rocky (like a lot of the SNL political sketches lately) and it honestly might just be hard to make Mueller funny since as an audience we don't really know anything about him as a person and it's hard to do characterization of a blank slate. But it there is one golden line that the audience loved. When Eric says that he hears people say Mueller is the worst thing that ever happened to his dad, he retorts, "No, Eric, getting elected president was the worst thing that ever happened to your dad."
