While a guest on Conan Monday night, former Saturday Night Live performer Taran Killam reflected on his previous comments criticizing Donald Trump’s appearance on the show in November 2015. In retrospect, and after a lot of soul-searching, Killam has since realized that, yeah, he still 100 percent thinks it was a bad idea. If anything, Taran Killam regrets it now more than ever! “It’s not necessarily a critique of the show,” he says. “But boy, it’s really hard to have played a part in encouraging or, not even encouraging, just offering a platform for and promoting someone who I find I’m constantly disappointed in.”
Earlier this year, Killam characterized Trump’s visit to SNL as “not fun,” and alleged that the current POTUS “struggled” to comprehend the show’s sketches, a claim fellow performer Pete Davidson has also made about Trump. On Conan, Killam went into further detail about his experience joining the then-candidate at an SNL writer-and-cast dinner the week of the show. “It was tense,” Killam laughs, describing Trump’s lament over the one downside of potentially winning the presidency: never getting to visit his beautiful new property in Scotland. “The priorities were off,” Killam concludes. Jokes Conan, “I don’t think SNL swayed the election necessarily. Wait a minute … yes, it did.”
