Colin Jost’s Weekend Update Segment Ignites a Familiar, and Predictable, Presidential Fury.

NEW YORK — It took Colin Jost exactly 43 seconds on Saturday night to summon .the former, and possibly future, president of the United States from whatever corner of Mar-a-Lago he currently occupies.

During the “Weekend Update” portion of Saturday Night Live, Mr. Jost, seated behind the familiar faux-wood desk in Studio 8H, delivered what has already been described across social media as the most surgically precise late-night evisceration of Donald J. Trump in years. The studio audience reacted with the kind of sustained, almost disbelieving laughter that late-night writers spend entire careers chasing. By the time the segment ended, less than four minutes later, the clip was ricocheting across platforms with a velocity usually reserved for national emergencies or Taylor Swift sightings.

What made the moment extraordinary was not merely the sharpness of the writing — though it was viciously sharp — but the eerie prescience baked into it. Mr. Jost appeared to anticipate, almost to the second, how Mr. Trump would respond. And Mr. Trump, watching from Florida, obliged with the precision of a man who has spent a decade responding to late-night barbs as though they were declarations of war.

At 11:17 p.m. Eastern time, as the SNL credits began to roll on the East Coast, Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social a message written entirely in capital letters that called Mr. Jost a “low-rated, no-talent clown” and accused NBC of “election interference by late-night comedy.” By 11:29, he had posted twice more, promising that “Saturday Night Live will be held accountable” and describing Mr. Jost and his co-anchor Michael Che as “two very sick people.” The posts, familiar in tone and cadence to anyone who followed Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed before his 2021 ban, were immediately screen-captured and appended to the original clip, turning a strong late-night bit into something closer to performance art.

Inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the reaction was a mixture of exhilaration and weary recognition. Several staff members, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the show, described the writers’ room erupting when the first Truth Social post appeared on a phone screen. “It was like watching a magic trick you already know the mechanics of,” one writer said, “but still can’t quite believe works every single time.”

For Mr. Jost, 41, the segment represented a return to the kind of unapologetic political satire that defined much of SNL’s 2016-2020 era, a period when the show’s ratings soared even as it became a recurring target of presidential ire. Since Mr. Trump left office, the program has at times seemed uncertain about how aggressively to cover a former president who is no longer in power yet remains the dominant figure in American political life. Saturday’s segment suggested that uncertainty may be over.

The bit itself relied less on impressions — long the show’s default mode for Mr. Trump — than on a kind of forensic psychological portrait. Without ever slipping into mimicry, Mr. Jost outlined a man so predictable in his rage that he could be baited on live television with the confidence of a fisherman setting a hook. The audience laughter, loud and cathartic, carried with it an unmistakable undercurrent of relief: in an era of ceaseless news, here, finally, was something that still behaved exactly as expected.

By Sunday morning, the clip had been viewed more than 28 million times across platforms, a number that dwarfs even the most viral moments from the show’s Trump-saturated 45th season. On X, the phrase “Colin Jost just read Trump’s mind” trended alongside screenshots of the president-elect’s posts. On TikTok, teenagers who were in elementary school during Mr. Trump’s presidency stitched the segment with reaction videos that betrayed both delight and a faint, almost anthropological fascination with a ritual they had only read about in history books.

For all the online jubilation, however, there remains a quieter, more complicated sentiment among some late-night veterans. Lorne Michaels, SNL’s 81-year-old executive producer, has spent nearly half a century navigating the line between provocation and self-preservation. Several people close to the show said Mr. Michaels watched the segment from the control room with his customary inscrutability, offering no immediate comment. One longtime cast member, granted anonymity to speak candidly, described the mood backstage as “electric but exhausted,” adding, “We just proved the machine still works exactly the same way. The question is how many times we can keep pressing the same button before it stops being funny.”

Mr. Trump, for his part, spent much of Sunday morning amplifying the feud, reposting memes that depicted Mr. Jost as a crying clown and promising supporters that “SNL’s days of getting away with this are numbered.” Whether that constitutes a genuine threat or merely the latest iteration of a now decade-long pattern remains, as always, a matter of interpretation.

What is beyond dispute is that for one brief, blazing moment on Saturday night, Colin Jost managed to compress the entire surreal loop of American political life in the Trump era — the joke, the outrage, the counter-outrage, the virality — into under four minutes of network television. The audience laughed because it was funny. They also laughed, perhaps, because they recognized the script all too well. And somewhere in Florida, a man who may soon return to the Oval Office took the bait with the reliability of a grandfather clock striking midnight.

In an age of infinite content and diminishing attention, that may be the most impressive magic trick of all.