The reason that President-elect Donald Trump refused to take part in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch when he hosted the show in 2015 has finally been revealed.
Trump was supposed to wear a tree costume and stand “next to the Giving Tree, the Shel Silverstein character who gives and gives of herself until she’s reduced to a stump,” The New Yorker’s Susan Morrison wrote in a profile of “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels that published Monday.
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Trump would have ended the bit mocking the Giving Tree as “a sucker,” said Morrison.
But the then-presidential hopeful nixed the segment “not because it portrayed him as heartless but because he worried that the tree costume made him look fat,” she explained in a lengthy piece on Michaels, the 50 years of the show and the mechanics of how the weekly program comes together.