Saturday Night Live’s James Austin Johnson took to the stage as President Donald Trump, promising to “Make America Great Depression Again” in a spoof of the president’s “Liberation Day” announcement in which he detailed his widespread tariffs.
“Thank you all for coming out to hear about tariffs. My favorite word, tariff, which, of course, is short for a-terrific-idea,” said Trump, calling the tax on Americans the “backbone of my incredible plan for our economy.”
“It's actually even better than a plan, because it's a series of random numbers, like the numbers on the computer screen in Severance,” he added. “You have no idea what the hell they mean, but I know what the numbers mean … They mean we're gonna make America wealthy again. You know you're gonna check your stock portfolio in a couple days and think ‘I'm almost too wealthy.’”
But before all that, the president said, “We’re going to do MAGDA — Make America Great Depression Again … It'll be better than great. It'll be a fantastic, unbelievable depression, the likes of which have never been seen before.”
Johnson, as Trump, called back to the campaign in the fall when the president, then a candidate for office, spread the conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were stealing and eating people’s pets.
“You know, the depression is going to be so great. We'll be the ones eating the cats and the dogs. That's going to be fun,” he said.
Trump provides an update on his recent tariffs pic.twitter.com/vsX224eBWf
— Saturday Night Live - SNL (@nbcsnl) April 6, 2025
As he announced widespread tariffs on Wednesday, the actual Trump claimed that the Great Depression would never have happened had the U.S. stuck to its tariff policy — even though experts say the tariffs worsened the economy at the time.
Trump indicated trouble began after the income tax was launched in 1913. Before that, the U.S. relied on tariffs.
“From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation, and the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been,” the president argued.
The U.S. was “collecting so much money, so fast, we didn’t know what to do with it,” claimed Trump.
“Then, in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government,” he said.
Tariffs imposed on foreign goods aren’t paid by foreign nations as Trump often falsely claims.
U.S. tariffs imposed on imported goods are paid to the American government by companies in the U.S. importing the goods. Much, if not all, of that extra cost is passed onto consumers in the form of higher purchase prices.
Trump claimed Wednesday that the good times in the U.S. “all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression” in 1929.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 raised tariffs on thousands of goods and is widely seen as exacerbating the economic downward spiral. Smoot-Hawley “remains a watchword for the perils of protectionism,” notes the State Department’s Office of the Historian.
“Smoot-Hawley did nothing to foster cooperation among nations in either the economic or political realm during a perilous era in international relations,” the site states. “It quickly became a symbol of the ‘beggar-thy-neighbor’ policies of the 1930s. Such policies, which were adopted by many countries during this time, contributed to a drastic contraction of international trade.”
The act is viewed as having worsened the economic decline, which lasted between 1929 and 1939, as it undermined international trade and drastically reduced the nation’s income from products.
On Saturday night, SNL moved on to mocking Trump’s massive board on which the tariffs were laid out.
“We listed the countries in an order that's neither alphabetical nor numerical for maximum confusion,” said the president. “The tariffs will be reciprocal. We love the word reciprocal, unless it's in the bedroom, right fellas? You want me to do what? Yeah, the guys know what I'm talking about.”
“We need to send a message to countries who have been ripping us off, like South Africa. South Africa puts a 60 percent tariff on everything we send them, and they've never even sent us one good thing,” said Trump, prompting the appearance of Mike Myers as Elon Musk – the South African-born head of DOGE – lamenting the protests against Tesla.
“We're introducing the new Tesla Model V, the first electric car in history to be fully self-vandalizing, with features like self-smashing headlights, self-slashing tires, and AI-powered graffiti,” said Musk. “You can choose from penises or swastikas or my favorite — swastikas made out of penises.”
“Wow. Swastikas made of penises — we are truly the party of Lincoln,” Trump responded.
