Let us take a trip all the way back to the magical year of 2015 when the former businessman and reality television personality and soon-to-be president of the United States Donald Trump hosted Saturday Night Live. At the time, a nominee for the highest office in the country hosting a weekly sketch comedy show was a tad divisive, but generally seen as harmless.
In retrospect, it may have been quite ironic.
In the episode, Trump appears in a sketch with Vanessa Bater and Cecily Strong that revolves around porn stars—nearly a decade after Trump’s alleged affair with adult-film star stormy daniels in 2006. Though Bayer said Trump was reluctant at first, he very quickly came around to the idea.
“It was interesting. Cecily and I, we do this porn stars sketch. We did it with him,” Bayer, who left SNL last year after seven seasons, told Stephen Colbert during an appearance on his Late Show. “Actually, the last time we got to do it was with him.”
Given that Trump had recently annonced his intention to run for president, the candidate wasn’t sure how posing with two fictional porn stars would be received in the public eye. But Bayer steered him away from his doubts, as she explains it.
“We were kind of rehearsing and he was, like, ‘Do you think I should do the porn star sketch?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ Cause I wanted to get my sketch on… And he goes, ‘But I’m running for president,'” she said. “And I go, ‘Well, I think it shows you have a good sense of humor.'”
Bayer added: “And then I was like, ‘Oh my God, am I sabotaging his campaign?’ I was like, ‘I don’t want him to win, but is it going to be because of the sketch I do with him with porn stars, showing him with porn stars?'”
Though the Stormy Daniels story has been a point of focus for many, it hasn’t yet impacted Trump’s duties as president, which Bayer acknowledged.
“And it seems like that doesn’t matter,” she said.
Thus far, no negative story about the president has really taken a toll on him or his administration, and lampooning him, as SNL likes to do these days with Alec Baldwin, has done little more than elicit a few tweets from the Commander in Chief.
You can see Bayer’s full comments with Colbert below.
