We Officially Have the New SNL of the Trump Era
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calc(100vw - 30px)" width="1560">There's no delicate way of saying this, so I'll just come right out with it: About halfway through the most recent episode of South Park , an impish JD Vance offers to help a micropenis-sporting Donald Trump have sex with the devil by asking, “Would you like me to apply the baby oil to Satan's asshole, boss?” Given that the same episode also shows Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem violently murdering no fewer than a dozen puppies (something she's actually done in real life to at least one!), I was rather shocked we didn't get a shot of Vance lubricating things up for the president's satanic sodomy session.
The second episode of South Park 's 27th season, which aired on Comedy Central on Wednesday night, was more evidence that creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker are among the few powerful people in media still willing to risk the ire of the White House by challenging the MAGA movement. After last month's premiere went in on corporate boss Paramount and institutional capitulation to Trump, the latest episode skewered everything from the manosphere podcasts that helped get Trump elected , to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents acting as his enforcers of white supremacy , to the gaudy tackiness of Mar-a-Lago, where teenage masseuses are shown flitting about (a speedy reference to Trump's own comments last week that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “stole” young female workers from him).
In just two episodes, South Park has swiftly become the Saturday Night Live of the Trump 2.0 era: a cultural fixture that's found new energy and relevance as TV's sharpest satire of [ gestures everywhere ] all this. For whatever reason, SNL proved, during his first administration, to be a production that got under Trump's skin. Maybe it was the show's synonymousness with New York or 1970s nostalgia. Maybe it was just his hatred for Alec Baldwin, who was tasked with playing the president. But South Park has the potential to irk the forces and figures around Trump in a way SNL can't. (Indeed, the premiere did make waves at the White House, per Rolling Stone .) Many of the nation's currently most influential chuds grew up on this series, idolizing its naughtiness and defiance of “PC culture.” Now they're the targets—and the show is not holding back.
Wednesday's episode, titled “Got a Nut,” begins in South Park Elementary, where Jesus Christ is still wandering the halls at the behest of the administration (and Paramount). Students are outraged about someone who is seeking attention by spewing offensive things about Jews and women, but it's not Eric Cartman (or Trump). Instead, Clyde Donovan started a podcast built on the same far-right contrarian culture that gave us the human potato Charlie Kirk and his freakish gums . “Prove me wrong!” Clyde shouts as he hawks protein powder by saying things like “White people are the underprivileged, and women belong at home.” Clyde is open with the school's guidance counselor, Mr. Mackey, that he's being provocative only in order to get his “nut” and afford the $60 a week he needs for video games, streaming platforms, and DoorDash. But the podcast offends Cartman—not for its substance but for the fact that Clyde has obviously stolen his whole shtick. This leads Cartman to lean into the agitator brand himself and become a “mass debater” ( South Park is nothing if not juvenile) by repeatedly asking people what their definition of a woman is.
Most of the episode, however, follows Mr. Mackey, who is forced to find new work after the school's principal lets him go to save money now that Jesus is on staff and can give the students proper religious guidance. To afford his own “nut,” Mackey takes a job with ICE against his principles, unable to turn down the $50,000 signing bonus and six-figure salary—both of which are very real . “We don't ask for experience! Just show up!” an ICE recruitment commercial sings as overweight gamers and teenagers —again, real !—are shown transforming into gun-toting, mask-wearing agents. “We don't care if you've read a book or grown up, if you're crazy or fat and lazy! We don't care at all!”
Noem appears frequently throughout the episode. Initially, she's in the ICE orientation video Mackey is shown after her instant hiring, getting made up by a glam squad and posing in front of prisons—something she seems to enjoy . Then, she's overseeing the raid Mackey is immediately sent to carry out at a Dora the Explorer concert, at which grandmothers and Dora herself are being detained. “Remember: Only detain the brown ones!” Noem instructs, as Mackey and ICE agents later raid heaven to arrest Latino angels flying among the clouds. “If it's brown, it goes down!”
South Park 's Noem has two main qualities. First, her face has a tendency to melt and slither off, so she requires frequent injections from her glam squad. Second, she hates puppies and will shoot them on sight. In Wednesday's episode, we get several scenes in which Noem blows off the heads of several dogs, including that of a service animal at the Dora concert and Krypto , the sidekick to Superman . Much like the real Noem , she tells Mackey and the other ICE agents that she does this because, sometimes, doing what's important means doing what's hard, even if that means wandering into a pet store to commit a rampage—something we see and hear during the show's closing credits.
Both Clyde and Mr. Mackey are eventually treated to a trip to Mar-a-Lago. In Clyde's case, it's a reward for his podcasting, but in Mackey's, it's so Trump can offer him a job as the new DHS secretary because he finds Noem's face so off-putting. The episode depicts Trump's Florida compound as a version of Fantasy Island , populated by nursing home residents in bikinis. The president even sports a white suit and black tie, just as Ricardo Montalbán did on that series. He's also accompanied by his own version of Hervé Villechaize, with Vance serving as his minion. Importantly, the vice president is the only character other than Trump to be animated using a real photograph—a decision that I suspect was made purely so that Stone and Parker could use a picture that resembles the Vance Bald Baby meme .
By the episode's end, Mr. Mackey and Clyde have learned to value principles over profit. “I know we all have a lot of pressures and we all want nice things,” Mr. Mackey says. “But if you're doing something you don't really believe in just to make your nut, you're gonna find you just get sadder and your nut just gets bigger.” It's an important message on morality to air on the same day that Apple CEO Tim Cook went to the Oval Office to splay himself before the cameras and give another gaudy gift to the president .
It's likely that the response from the administration to this episode will mirror what happened last time . It'll attack the show as irrelevant, all the while seeing things behind the scenes. ( When the DHS this week posted a screenshot from the episode on The show has the potential to help reshape the public image of Trump, and it can do so from the bottom up, in the depths of low culture, where many of his most ardent supporters celebrate. Stone and Parker aren't just showing viewers that the emperor has no clothes—they're showing his naked micropenis too.
