Tom Hanks ripped after mocking Trump supporters in 'SNL' skit
'This show wonders why their ratings are in the gutter'
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Tom Hanks is catching heat for his mocking portrayal of a Donald Trump supporter during Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary special Sunday night.
During a Black Jeopardy sketch, Hanks’ character Doug, who he played in an episode nearly a decade ago before Trump was first elected president in 2016, appears on a parody game show wearing a red Make America Great Again cap and refuses to shake Kenan Thompson’s hand, who plays the host Darnell Hayes.
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“Welcome to Black Jeopardy, the only Jeopardy where every single viewer fully understood Kendrick (Lamar’s) halftime performance,” Thompson says, referring to the rapper’s halftime show at the Super Bowl.
Towards the end of the parody, which also featured Leslie Jones, Tracy Morgan, Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock, Hanks’ Doug shows up and says, “I heard a fella could win some money here.” After buzzing in with a correct answer, Doug later says, “If more folks went to church, we wouldn’t be in this mess we’re in now.”
When Darnell tries to shake his hand, Doug backs away and says, “Don’t like that,” before reluctantly agreeing to clasp hands with Darnell.
“Maybe I’ll start a show for you to come on and we’ll call it ‘White Jeopardy,’” Doug quips.
The sketch quickly went viral, with former Robert F. Kennedy Jr. aide Link Lauren calling SNL “an unfunny show for snobbish liberal elites” in a post to X.
“This show wonders why their ratings are in the gutter,” Lauren wrote. “Trump won the popular vote. This tired trope that MAGA is racist is disgusting … The current Republican Party is a big tent coalition compromised of many former Democrats. Good riddance, SNL!”
“For its 50-year anniversary special, SNL had Tom Hanks play a racist Trump supporter afraid to shake a black man’s hand,” Outkick founder Clay Travis added on X Monday morning. “Fun fact: Trump’s 2024 election win was the LEAST racially divisive American election since 1964.”
Conservative commentator Benny Johnson claimed the skit demonstrated that the show has “learned nothing” in its 50 years on the air.
“SNL decided it was a good idea to depict Tom Hanks as a ‘Racist Trump Supporter’ in a MAGA Hat afraid to shake a black man’s hand,” he wrote. “Donald Trump just won a landslide election and has never been more popular with Americans.”
Conservative influencer Kevin Dalton said the attempt at a joke was proof the Democrats will “continue to lose landslide election after landslide election.”
“Tom Hanks in a MAGA hat, horrified at the idea of shaking a black man’s hand, tells you everything you need to know about what the left has learned since November,” Dalton wrote.
Mario Nawfal, host of The Roundtable Show, called the segment “tone deaf.”
“Hollywood still doesn’t get it: Portraying Trump supporters as racist caricatures while he’s winning record minority support. SNL’s trying 2016 jokes in 2025,” he wrote on X.
Former View co-host Meghan McCain also hit out at the two-time Oscar winner on Monday morning, writing, “Tom Hanks always wants to pretend he’s the likable everyman, but he’s as hate mongering of regular Americans as any host on MSNBC. Good luck becoming less and less culturally relevant by the second, bro.”
Elsewhere, during the show’s opening monologue, former cast member Steve Martin also poked fun at Trump’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
“It was only a few days ago that (series producer and creator) Lorne (Michaels) told me I was doing the monologue, and I was actually vacationing on a friend’s boat down in the Gulf of Steve Martin,” the comedian joked.
Despite appearing as a host twice, including back in 2015 when he was running for his first presidency, Trump has a checkered past with SNL.
“I once hosted Saturday Night Live, and the ratings were HUUUGE! Now, however, the ratings are lower than ever before, and the show will probably be put to rest,'” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2022.
“It is just not, at these levels, sustainable — A bad show that’s not funny or smart. (Lorne Michaels) is angry and exhausted, the show even more so. It was once good, never great, but now, like the Late Night Losers who have lost their audience but have no idea why, it is over for SNL — A great thing for America!”
On the show, six different SNL stars — including the late Phil Hartman, Darrell Hammond, Jason Sudeikis, Taran Killam, Alec Baldwin, and current cast member James Austin Johnson — have all played Trump.
After Baldwin started impersonating him during his first presidency, Trump called the show “unwatchable” and said his “portrayal stinks.”
When he first started playing the Republican, Johnson told Seth Meyers that repeating things that Trump actually said didn’t land with audiences.
“When I started abstracting him, I made him like a guy talking about the wizard on the hill. I would do like a medieval Trump, like a fantasy movie Trump… and that’s when I started getting the laughs with it,” he said.
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