Donald Trump’s Vain Reason For Nixing ‘Saturday Night Live’ Sketch Is Finally Revealed

The reason that President-elect Donald Trump refused to take part in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch when he hosted the show in 2015 has finally been revealed.

Trump was supposed to wear a tree costume and stand “next to the Giving Tree, the Shel Silverstein character who gives and gives of herself until she’s reduced to a stump,” The New Yorker’s Susan Morrison wrote in a profile of “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels that published Monday.

Trump would have ended the bit mocking the Giving Tree as “a sucker,” said Morrison.

But the then-presidential hopeful nixed the segment “not because it portrayed him as heartless but because he worried that the tree costume made him look fat,” she explained in a lengthy piece on Michaels, the 50 years of the show and the mechanics of how the weekly program comes together.

Trump hosted the show in November of 2015, a year before he defeated Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

In his monologue, above, he bombastically declared his apperance would be “something special,” teased his “a lot of people schtick” and took aim at Rosie O’Donnell, with whom he has had a yearslong feud. Trump also mocked then-Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and danced to Drake’s “Hotline Bling.”

For Trump’s 2004 hosting, he danced with cast members dressed as chickens.

When the show marked its 15th anniversary in 1998, he appeared in the audience and had popcorn dumped on him by Chevy Chase.

“SNL” alum Seth Meyers, who now hosts NBC’s “Late Night,” in 2019 recalled working alongside Trump for his hosting debut.

“It was fascinating to be around him,” Meyers, a longtime critic of the returning president, told radio host Howard Stern. Trump “was everything you would think, he didn’t have any sense of humor but if things worked, he liked them.”

Watch that interview here: