“Saturday Night Live” tackled Signalgate in its cold open on Saturday with a sketch involving Vice President JD Vance (Bowen Yang), Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (Andrew Dismukes) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio (Marcello Hernández) accidentally crashing a group chat run by a trio of high school girls (Sarah Sherman, Ego Nwodim and the episode’s host Mikey Madison).
Dismukes’ Hegseth is the first to crash the chat with a text announcing a forthcoming attack on Yemen accompanied by a string of emojis. When he’s asked by one of the chat’s girls who he is, he proudly writes back, “Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense! Israel better bend over and spread it. Baller! Water squirt emoji. God bless the troops. Eggplant emoji.”
Before long, the girls’ innocuous text chat is further disrupted by Yang’s Vance and Hernández’s Rubio, who share confidential information with them and Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg (Mikey Day), who was yet again accidentally invited to a confidential group chat.
You can catch the full “SNL” cold open below:
Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and the girls in the Signal chat pic.twitter.com/m9mXxxSAZI
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) March 30, 2025
Madison’s Jennabelle reacts with understandable horror when Dismukes’ Hegseth, Yang’s Vance and Hernández’s Rubio share the “updated locations of all our nuclear submarines,” a list of all of America’s “deep cover CIA agents” and “the real JFK files, not those fake ones we released.” The men all brush off the girls’ attempts to make them aware of their mistake, though, and choose to instead keep talking embarrassingly openly about sensitive government matters.
At one point, Dismukes’ Hegseth asks Yang’s Vance, who is standing the whole time in front of a green-screen image of Greenland, how his visit to the Dutch territory is going. “Nobody knows why I’m here, especially me,” Yang’s Vance responds candidly. “But praise Trump! Our work here is mysterious and important. Egypt owes us big time for this Yemen shiz. POTUS is saying we should make them give us the pyramids.”
Eventually, Madison’s Jennabelle has to leave because, as she tells the chat, “Matt’s here to pick me up. We’re going to a movie.” In response, Dismukes’ Hegseth asks, “Who? [Matt] Gaetz?,” and, in the sketch’s cleverest moment, the high-school-aged Jennabelle texts back, “Actually, yeah!”
It is ultimately Hernández’s Rubio who realizes his and his fellow officials’ error. When he does, he texts the girls back, “In that case, we were totally pranking you guys! LOL! … But would you mind emailing your names and home addresses to deportations@ice.gov?”
