New York City – The Daily Beast reports that lame jokes about the presidents being “gay for each other” are so common you may not have noticed a problem with the sketch on Saturday, December 8. But that doesn’t mean they’re okay. Far from it. It is approaching two years since Donald Trump was sworn into office, which means it’s been two years of Russia “collusion” talk and parsing of his relationship with Vladimir Putin. It’s been endless, and exhausting – and lazy, and ignorant, and offensive, and base-level, and baseless, and homophobic, and, well, not really a joke at all.

The most recent example happened during the December 8th episode of “Saturday Night Live,” as part of a recurring bit that exists to test your eye-roll reflex: Alec Baldwin’s Trump and Beck Bennett’s always-shirtless Putin making light of their close ties by winking at a homosexual relationship.

The brief bit was part of the episode’s cold open, in which Trump is awake in the middle of the night, despondent about the Robert Mueller probe while at the G20 Summit in Argentina. He’s visited by a revolving door of his shady cronies, including, at one point, Putin. “Honey, why you still up?” Bennett’s Putin says, emerging from a hotel room door bare-chested with a randy, horny smirk. He seductively pats the small of Baldwin’s Trump’s back. “Come back to bed, babe!” Trump feigns jealousy over Putin’s bewildering, jolly handshake with the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Putin gets defensive over how it means nothing to him: “I’m not, like, bros with him or anything.” Further calming his political paramour down, he continues, “You’re not my sidepiece. You’re, like, my main girlfriend. This Saudi guy is just a random hookup.” t (The Daily Beast – Kevin Fallon at Thedailybeast.com/snls-homophobic-trump-putin-jokes-need-to-stop)