Alec Baldwin decided to pop in for one of his intermittent Donald Trump cold opens on last night’s Scarlett Johansson-hosted Saturday Night Live. His Trump is, it turns out, very bad at coping with an alien (as in space alien) invasion, as one might expect. The sketch was fine, even if it smacked of Baldwin’s one foot out the door attitude toward portraying the Donald every week. (When he’d rather be picking Twitter beefs with other actors who would like to get paid to portray the Donald every week.)
But Baldwin’s spotty attendance has forced SNL writers to look elsewhere for ways to stick it to their least favorite sitting president, and last night’s show featured a finely crafted shot across Trump’s bow—that landed in the toilet water at daughter Ivanka’s feet. “Complicit,” as the impeccably made fake commercial explains, is the perfume specially crafted for Ivanka, embodying as it does the essence of “a woman who knows what she wants, and knows what she’s doing.”
What Ivanka is doing, it’s implied in the short film, is lucratively positioning herself as the “nice Trump” who truly believes in equality, women’s rights, LGBT rights, and all that other nice stuff that her dad’s administration routinely treats with hostility, contempt, and regressive executive orders. As Johansson’s Ivanka makes her elegant way through an opulent party, she’s greeted with icy stares and outright mockery as the narrator intones, “She’s a feminist, an advocate, a champion for women—but, like, how?” Baldwin’s Trump makes a silent reappearance as Ivanka stops in front of a mirror to touch up her lipstick, only to see her father there, her Trump’s soul inescapable. As the narrator puts it, finally, “Complicit” is “the fragrance for the woman who could stop all this, but won’t.”