Saturday Night Live turned President Donald Trump’s frustration over the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s planned livestream of a firing-squad execution into fresh late-night material on its October 10 episode.
Newsweek reported that Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che led the charge, while a cold open sketched Hegseth welcoming sailors home and addressing the December execution plan.
Jost opened by casting Trump’s Nobel loss as a “tragic developing story,” then played a clip of the president at a Syracuse, New York, rally criticizing the choice. Trump said the recipient was someone “nobody has ever heard of” and called the decision an “indelible stain” on Norway.
The prize went Friday to South African human rights lawyer Navanethem “Navi” Pillay. Trump had also been passed over for the 2025 award, which went to Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado for work promoting democratic rights and pushing Venezuela from dictatorship toward democracy.
Pillay lightly suggested she might share the prize with Trump if the audience applauded enough. Jost joked about Trump’s Oscar chances for the 2021 film Tom & Jerry. Che quipped that Trump might bomb a country in response.
The cold open put Jost in the role of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth greeting sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln after an extended deployment. Reports cited poor conditions aboard, including broken plumbing and mental-health struggles. The sketch also needled the administration’s “Department of War” branding and joked the new logo had a “Nazi vibe.”
Hegseth’s character turned to the scheduled December firing-squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting. Plans call for livestreaming the execution.
"You're back home safe in sunny San Diego, which the president just asked Iran to blow up."
That was Jost as Hegseth. He also said “public executions are back, kind of like Scrubs.” The sketch nodded to Trump’s earlier line that losing San Diego and Los Angeles was a “small price to pay for keeping the world safe” in the context of conflict with Iran.
Che referenced an image of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on screen after an ICE shooting of a 28-year-old New York City resident on Thursday. He joked the broadcast would be the first public execution since “a couple weeks ago.”
Reports that ICE agents could use shock gloves drew another Che line: the devices could “cause incredible pain.” He hoped it would happen “to an agent who forgets to take them off at the urinal.”
James Austin Johnson appeared as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the cold open. Newsweek contacted the White House via online form on Sunday for comment. SNL is set to skip new episodes on October 17 and October 24.
Late-night comedy keeps treating border enforcement, military justice, and a president’s public fight with the Nobel committee as punch lines. Voters watching the same week’s crime and security headlines can decide whose priorities look more serious.
