In last night’s Saturday Night Live cold open, three teenage girls chatted over Signal. They gossiped (“Did you guys see what Jessica wore at school today? Oh my God, she is such a pick-me girl”). They teased one another (“Hey, it takes one to know one, Bannessa!”). They did what teenage girls do. And then:
“FYI: Green light on Yemen raid.”
Yep, SNL entered the Signalgate chat. In SNL’s version of events, it wasn’t (just) Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief—played by Mikey Day—who was added to the now-infamous text chain known as the “Houthi PC small group.” This time it was also three teenage girls, played by Ego Nwodim, Sarah Sherman, and the episode’s host, the recent Oscar winner Mikey Madison.
In this scenario, Pete Hegseth, played by Andrew Dismukes, was the wayward texter. “Tomahawks airborne 15 minutes ago,” he announced. “Who’s ready to glass some Houthi rebels? Flag emoji, flag emoji, flag emoji, fire emoji, eggplant.” Soon, more members of the Trump administration joined the chain. Marco Rubio (played by Marcello Hernández) chimed in from a bedroom. A parka-clad J. D. Vance (Bowen Yang) popped in from the tundra in Greenland. The men congratulated themselves. They sent many, many emoji. They discussed sensitive military information in roughly the same way that Bannessa talked about her classmate’s sartorial choices.
Throughout the chat, the girls repeatedly told the men that they’d made a mistake. “Um, do we know you, bro?” Madison’s character said as Hegseth kept typing away (“God bless the troops … eggplant”). “This is Jennabelle.”
“Oh, nice!” Hegseth replied. “Jennabelle from Defense, right?”
Nwodim’s character tried a more direct tack: “Hey, I think you have the wrong group chat.”
“Lololol!” Hegseth replied. “Could you imagine if that actually happened? Homer disappear into bush GIF. Hey, while I got everyone, sending a PDF with updated locations of all our nuclear submarines.”
In 2017, in an SNL parody that has become a classic, Melissa McCarthy made a surprise appearance as Sean Spicer, Donald Trump’s first press secretary. McCarthy turned Spicer’s anti-press antics against him, pounding her fists, flaring her nostrils, and twisting belligerence into a full-body schtick. The performance allegedly angered Trump—not only because of the mockery but more specifically because the mockery had involved a gender swap. “Trump,” a presidential donor told Politico at the time, “doesn’t like his people to look weak.”
But last night’s cold open brought a new dimension to the satire. The gender-swapping was also a matter of age-swapping—adults became teenagers and men became girls. The comparison wasn’t direct, as it had been with Spicer. But it still played as a rebuke: The teen girls were the ones who read, throughout the sketch, as the adults in the room.
In SNL’s portrayal, the men seemed to fancy themselves stars in a classic war epic: swaggering, serious, men being men. But the sketch genre-swapped too: The behavior of the men in charge, the show suggested, found them acting like extras in Mean Girls. Hegseth and his fellow officials, as they congratulated themselves with their GIFs and fire emoji, went on to share the specific location of a nuclear submarine (“right outside Shanghai”), a PDF of “all deep-cover CIA agents,” and “the real JFK files—not those fake ones we released.”
Even after Nwodin piped up (“We’ve been trying to tell you—we’re in high school”) the officials, ignoring the girls’ warnings, proceeded with adolescent recklessness. Their behavior was rash. It was emotional. It was self-conscious. The men, discussing war, preened for one another.
At the outset of the sketch, one of the girls praised a joke that Jennabelle had made. “This is exactly why you’re the Queen Bee,” Sherman’s character said, “and I totally defer to you.” The line didn’t land too well as a joke. But it did establish the stakes of the satire. It was likely a reference to the book that Mean Girls was famously based on, Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence—and a nod to the willingness that grown men have shown to serve the queen bee in the White House.
Before long, Vance was signing in to the chat from his “diplomatic” visit to Greenland. “Nobody knows why I’m here, especially me,” he said. “But praise Trump—our work here is mysterious and important.” The joke suggested that it was Vance’s boss, rather than SNL, that had brought the logic of the gender swap to the workings of the U.S. government. For all their eggplant emoji and their high-fived acts of war, the show suggested, the chatters of Signalgate were mean girls in disguise—government officials remade as pick-me men.
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