EXPOSED

The Real Reason Trump Refused to Dress as a Tree on ‘SNL’

‘SNL’ writers previously revealed that Trump “wasn’t into” the 2015 “Giving Tree” sketch, but didn’t say why.

A New Yorker profile of Saturday Night Live boss Lorne Michaels revealed the real reason Donald Trump was “not into” an SNL sketch during which he’d have to don a tree costume. While writers Tim Herlihy and Bryan Tucker previously explained in a Huffington Post interview from 2017 that the sketch was nixed from Trump’s 2015 hosting stint following his lack of enthusiasm about it during a dress rehearsal, they hadn’t said why—only that he “was not into it” and “it showed.” In the sketch, Trump was to play a tree next to the “Giving Tree,” from Shel Silverstein’s children’s book. At the end of the sketch, after the “Giving Tree” had given the little boy in the story everything he had, Trump would call him a “sucker.” In the profile on Michaels from Monday, the New Yorker revealed that “Trump refused to do the piece, not because it portrayed him as heartless but because he worried that the tree costume made him look fat.”