Mikey Madison Mocks SignalGate in New SNL Cold Open

This past Saturday, newly anointed Academy Award winner Mikey Madison made her Saturday Night Live debut. The Anora star opened the episode with the SNL cast, satirizing the latest White House scandal, now dubbed SignalGate.

The #SNL girls have joined the war plans group chat pic.twitter.com/TO3MirCPIQ

— Saturday Night Network (@thesnlnetwork) March 30, 2025

Earlier this month, Jeffrey Goldberg, journalist and editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was mistakenly added to a private group chat on the message app Signal, including high-ranking members of the Trump Administration.

The group chat included 19 National Security members, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. Waltz was the person who accidentally included Goldberg in the chat.

In the chat, these high-ranking government members freely discussed US military operations currently underway in Yemen. Hegseth even shared detailed information on impending airstrikes and further attack plans on Houthi targets.

Goldberg published a partial transcript in The Atlantic on March 24. The following day, when President Trump’s officials accused him of mischaracterizing the information as top secret, they shared the full transcript.

It was a comical blunder full to the brim of irony. The jokes write themselves. The SNL writers probably didn’t need to spend more than an hour writing the sketch because the punchline was already written for them.

SNL SignalGate Cold Open

In this cold open, Madison, along with SNL players Sarah Sherman and Ego Nwodim, were a group gossiping teen girls, when in comes to Hegseth (Andrew Dismukes) feeling hyped, texting “FYI — Green light on Yemen raid!” along with a series of fire emojis and a lot of eggplants.

The girls try to warn Hegseth that he has the wrong chat, but to no avail. Hegseth cluelessly doubles down by adding Vance (Andrew Bowen Yang) and Rubio (Marcello Hernandez).

All three of these Trump Admin members proceeded to send classified PDFs. Hegseth gives updated locations of all our nukes, Rubio shares the “real” JFK files, and Vance sends a list of all their undercover CIA agents.

The PDF “leaks” that are comically absurd, except for that last one.

The original Signal chat mentioned the name of an active undercover female CIA officer. Goldberg withheld her name in his report, but CIA Director John Ratcliffe named her in this leaked chat.

Boy, Madison sure did luck out. An exciting news week in politics always means comedy gold will come the following Saturday, and she got to be the one hosting such an exciting event.

Beyond that, the actress deserves praise for killing it in her SNL debut. She was a fantastic host and worked well with the cast during the night’s sketches.

Stream Saturday Night Live on Peacock.