Aidy Bryant brought back her classic impressing of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, with a twist. She would answer reporters’ questions in the most blunt possible way — “That’s gonna be a hell yeah from me, Keith,” she declared in response to a question about whether she’d just compared Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to a carny — before breaking out out in a defiant song.
Not just any song, of course — Bryant’s Sanders broke out in a performance of “Confident” by Demi Lovato that was interspersed with the rest of the press conference. It was her way to declare that she isn’t a puppet of the administration but is saying all the things she says because the media sucks and can suck it. The thesis of this whole thing can be summed up in this bit:
“I used to hold the freak back/ now I’m letting go/ I made my own choice/ bitch I run this show/ you can call them lies/ but you can’t make me behave,” Bryant sang as she took a sledgehammer to the press briefing room podium.
Not content to sing the song as written, Bryant’s Sanders did make up her own lyrics at one point: “you say that I’m a puppet/ that I must be out of my mind/ all you media can stuff it stuff it stuff it.” You can watch the full sketch above.
The Sanders sketch was the second pointed political sketch of the evening, after the now-traditional Alec Baldwin/Donald Trump cold open. This week, Baldwin’s Trump took a shower with Paul Manafort, Vladimir Putin and Jeff Sessions while coming up with a plan that would allow him to pardon Manafort without it being a scandal. The plan he came up with was to disguise Manafort as the turkey that the president traditionally pardons at Thanksgiving.