“Saturday Night Live” castmember Leslie Jones is a friend of Donald Trump’s. “There’s a lot of stuff out there about me,” she told Hillary Rodham Clinton at a Clinton Foundation event at which Jones urged Clinton to come back to the presidency in 2020, all joking as people in the audience laughed knowingly. When Clinton persisted, Jones said: “This is not joking. Go sit it out.”
On her “In Memoriam” segment Sunday night, Jones announced “in solemn fashion” the recent death of “Deadbeat Daddy Don Jr.” The video, showing Jones and Trump standing by a golf course in the Florida sun and laughing, was a joke “to poke fun at what they think he is about,” she told The Washington Post on Monday.
Mariana Taveira, a spokeswoman for Atlantic City, N.J., police and fire officials, said Monday that a firefighter was killed in a car crash early Sunday near Atlantic City in N.J. Authorities there don’t believe a Trump visit there was a factor in the accident, Taveira said. No further details were immediately available, she said.
After it aired, the segment was widely mocked on social media. “I just thought it was funny,” Jones said. “She kind of wanted to talk to him, but I didn’t even think of it as a comment on him. He’s still a presidential candidate, so he’s still the president, and everything is still relevant.”
Jones, a regular castmember on “SNL” since 2014, is also a guest of Trump’s at Mar-a-Lago. Recently, she has said they have not talked about his presidency. “I don’t really talk about politics with him, to be honest,” she said. “We don’t discuss that. That’s why we’re not the best pals we used to be.”
Weeks ago, she did discuss her son’s death. “One of my sons is not here anymore. My daughter-in-law and son-in-law. They didn’t make it, so it was a really bad day,” she said on “Real Time With Bill Maher” that day. She also announced a movie in which her character is the last person standing at a G-8 summit and must work her way to the get to the president.