Will Ferrell's George W. Bush Reminds America How 'Bad' He Was

By Matt Wilstein, The Daily Beast

28 January 18

With Donald Trump in office, George W. Bush is ‘suddenly popular AF.’

his week’s Saturday Night Live opened with an Oval Office message from the president of the United States: George W. Bush.

When Will Ferrell’s Bush crashed Samantha Bee’s “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner” last year, he asked, triumphantly, “How do you like me now?”

This time, the SNL alum and host was here to remind us how “bad” he really was.

“I know what you're thinking,” Ferrell’s Bush said. “What the heck is this handsome devil doing back in the Oval Office? Well, the truth is, this is just a set. I had it built in my basement in Texas so I can pretend to still be president sometimes.”

“I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but according to a new poll, my approval rating is at an all-time high,” he added. “That’s right. Donny Q. Trump came in and suddenly I’m looking pretty sweet by comparison. At this rate, I might end up on Mt. Rushmore next to Washington, Lincoln, and I want to say Kensington?”

“The point is that I’m suddenly popular AF,” Bush said. “And a lot of people are saying man, ‘I wish George W. Bush was still our president right about now.’ So I just wanted to address my fellow Americans tonight and remind you guys that I was really bad. Like, historically not good. So I get why you don’t like this current guy. Heck, I voted for Jill Stein all the way. But please do not look back at my presidency and think ‘this is how we do it.’ Don’t forget we’re still in two different wars that I started.”

Comparing his vice president to Trump’s, Bush said, “If you knew half the stuff old Cheney was up to, you’d take no cakes for gays in a heartbeat,” adding, “Some say Mike Pence is heartless, but remember Dick Cheney was literally heartless.”

“And Donald Trump thinks the media hates him?” Bush asked “One time an Iraqi reporter threw an actual shoe at me. He took it off of his foot, lobbed it straight at my noggin. Then he gathered himself, took off the other one and tried it again. But you know what they say, ‘Shoe me once, shoe’s on you. Shoe me twice, I’m keeping those shoes.’”

Later, Bush laid out how much he has “in common” with Trump. “We are both the exact same age, even though I was president like 40 years ago,” he said. “We both won the election despite losing the popular vote, though back in my day, we didn’t let Russians rig our election. We used the Supreme Court like Americans.”

The sketch ended with Bush and his former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, played by Leslie Jones, dueting on the theme song from All in the Family: “Boy the way the game was played, everybody knew their place, Cheney shot a guy in the face, those were the days.”