{"id":493949,"date":"2026-10-12T21:52:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T21:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/493949\/"},"modified":"2026-10-12T21:52:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T21:52:11","slug":"snl-spoofs-hegseth-visit-to-san-diegos-uss-abraham-lincoln","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/493949\/","title":{"rendered":"SNL spoofs Hegseth visit to San Diego’s USS Abraham Lincoln"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two days after the USS Abraham Lincoln returned to San Diego<\/a> following a record-breaking combat deployment that was reportedly plagued by shortages of food and other supplies, \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d opened its show<\/a> over the weekend with a sketch poking fun at Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth\u2019s bravado during a visit to the aircraft carrier on its last full day at sea.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Hegseth spoke to the Lincoln\u2019s crew<\/a> for about 15 minutes during an all-hands gathering on the ship, which at one point went more than 260 days without a port call. During his address, Hegseth awarded the Lincoln carrier strike group<\/a>\u00a0a Presidential Unit Citation, the highest unit-level award for valor during combat. The Lincoln and its strike group of accompanying ships launched some of the first attacks in the U.S.-Israel war against Iran, and later enforced a maritime blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n

During his speech, Hegseth acknowledged he was the one who had twice ordered the Lincoln\u2019s deployment extended. But he did not mention the difficult conditions aboard the ship. Military officials have said there were eight suicide attempts among strike group personnel during the deployment, including a Lincoln sailor who reportedly jumped overboard Aug. 3<\/a>.<\/p>\n

During the show\u2019s cold open, cast member Colin Jost, reprising the role of Hegseth, asked a group of \u201cSNL\u201d cast members playing sailors how they were doing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re bad,\u201d one of them deadpanned.<\/p>\n

\u201cOK, I heard \u2018awesome,\u2019\u201d Jost joked.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter seven months at war, you\u2019re back home safe in sunny San Diego, which the president just asked Iran to blow up<\/a>,\u201d Jost continued \u2014 a reference to President Donald Trump\u2019s remarks during a campaign rally in Nebraska last week.<\/p>\n

During last week\u2019s visit to the Lincoln, Hegseth praised the crew for carrying out its combat mission with zero crew deaths or aircraft mishaps. Jost echoed that line, with a twist.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou executed over 3,000 combat missions, and you did it with zero casualties, zero flight mishaps and zero working toilets,\u201d Jost joked.<\/p>\n

According to some reports, flooding in bathrooms and galleys was a major problem aboard the Lincoln. One family member who spoke to the Union-Tribune at Thursday\u2019s homecoming said his sailor reported \u201cflooding of the restrooms, where everybody had to go from one side of the ship to the other to just use the restroom,\u201d and a resulting foul odor.<\/p>\n

The ship\u2019s commander, Capt. Daniel Keeler, briefly addressed those issues during a news conference Thursday.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a big floating city, you can see how large it is,\u201d Keeler said. \u201cAt any one moment there might be a clogged toilet, it happens. But I have a lot of trained engineers to fix those things. When things were broken, they got fixed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unrelated to the Hegseth-Lincoln sketch, \u201cSNL\u201d also stirred up controversy over the weekend when guest host Shane Gillis used an expletive during a sketch on the live broadcast, and in his monologue used homophobic language as well as derogatory language to describe women who dress in tight shorts at the gym. That comment drew criticism<\/a> from those who argued it objectified women<\/a>, especially at a time when an alleged gang rape at Cornell University has brought sexual assault into the national spotlight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two days after the USS Abraham Lincoln returned to San Diego following a record-breaking combat deployment that was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":493950,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[7,5493,181,23,1703,100,74,84,76,75,1696],"class_list":["post-493949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-california","tag-coronado","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-military","tag-news","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-county","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-top-stories-sdut"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/493950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}