NIKKI HALEY MAKES SURPRISE APPEARANCE IN ‘SNL’ COLD OPEN:

Republican presidential candidate popped into Rockefeller Plaza on Saturday for a surprise appearance on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” where she called out former President Trump’s resistance to debate and ongoing legal battles.

Haley, playing a “concerned South Carolina voter,” stood up in the mock audience during a fake CNN Town Hall with Trump — played by James Austin Johnson — and asked, “My question is why won’t you debate Nikki Haley?”

Her appearance prompted cheers from the audience and a not-so-happy reaction from Johnson.

As John Hinderaker of Power Line wrote in 2017, the core audience of today’s incarnation of NBC’s Saturday Night Live is the DNC-MSM:

Democratic Party news outlets report on Saturday Night Live skits because they want to amplify SNL’s anti-Trump message. “Respectable” news outlets like the AP can’t publish absurd comedy skits ripping President Trump, much as they might like to. But by covering Saturday Night Live, they turn such meaningless attacks into fake “news.”

And Haley can look back at the successful Republican presidential administrations of John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Gerald Ford’s brilliant second term to see how sucking up to NBC invariably ends: And With That Embarrassing Move, Nikki Haley Has to Know She’s Finished.