<em>South Park</em> Found Something New to Say About Trump. The White House Is Not Pleased.

It appears Matt Stone and Trey Parker had no choice. The South Park creators had said, after the end of the show’s previous season all the way back in 2023, that they were pretty much done with making fun of Donald Trump. Skipping the presidential election in its entirety was both a logistical necessity (as they negotiated contracts with Paramount, which owns South Park home Comedy Central) and a creative decision, the pair admitted to Vanity Fair in September. That’s because parodying so many elections during the show’s nearly 30-year run had been “a hard thing to do,” Stone said, adding that it “takes outsize importance” and can feel like a “mind scramble.”

But there was another reason: “I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump,” Parker said at the time.

Well, it turns out the pair have found something new to say. Trump was all over the Season 27 premiere, which aired Wednesday night—and not in ways that are likely to please our thin-skinned commander in chief. “Nobody makes fun of me and gets away with it!” Trump screams in one scene, right before stripping naked, revealing a micropenis, and jumping into bed to have sex with Satan. (Indeed, Rolling Stone reported Thursday that clips of the show were circulating among administration staff, prompting the White House to release a statement bashing South Park as an irrelevant “fourth-rate show.”)

Like some of the series’ best work, the episode was shamelessly crude and juvenile but also shockingly sharp and current, including even references to the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s show on sister network CBS, the cowardice over 60 Minutes on that same network, and Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. (The fast-working South Park team can turn around an episode in a matter of days.) And because of the current fearful political climate, it will likely go down as one of the most instantly controversial—and ballsy—episodes in the show’s history because of Stone and Parker’s willingness to bite the hand that feeds them. But it’s also the perfect piece of television for this moment in our history. After all, what better vehicle to satirize a tawdry and obscene administration that proudly revels in low culture and thumbs its nose at political correctness than South Park?

In the episode, written and directed by Parker and titled “Sermon on the Mount” (a riff on the word Paramount, you see?), South Park eviscerates the ways in which the Trump administration has reshaped American culture by bringing institutions like the media and universities to heel. It begins with Eric Cartman shocked to discover that NPR has gone off the air, not because he enjoys its reporting but because he always found a perverse joy in listening to shows “where all the lesbians and Jews complain about stuff.” Elsewhere in town, signs have been erected on public toilets to keep out transgender people. But most shocking is that the head of the boys’ elementary school, PC Principal, is no longer aggressively dedicated to wokeness but has since rebranded as “Power Christian Principal” and has welcomed Jesus Christ (a long-running character on the series) into the school. When Stan Marsh confidently says he can’t legally be expelled for not being a Christian, the principal tells him, “It’s not illegal anymore. This is 2025, and not much is illegal.”

Stan’s father, Randy, objecting to the religious indoctrination of his child, leads a posse of other concerned residents to confront the man they believe to be responsible: Mr. Garrison, the schoolteacher turned president who had been South Park’s Trump avatar for years before giving up power at the end of Season 26. It’s only when Randy and his mob learn that Mr. Garrison is now leading a quiet life watching The White Lotus with his boyfriend that they realize the truth: The real Trump is now president for the first time in South Park history.

Longtime fans of South Park will be quick to recognize that this isn’t just Trump as we previously knew him in the series. He’s the new manifestation of the twisted Saddam Hussein character the show introduced more than two decades ago. (“What are you?” the Canadian prime minister asks Trump in his very first scene in this episode. “Some kind of dictator from the Middle East?”) Like Saddam had been, Trump is animated with actual photos of his face placed atop a cartoon body. Like Saddam, he speaks in a squawking, over-the-top Canadian (or at least Canadian-ish) accent. And, like Saddam, Trump is in a tempestuous relationship with Satan that appears to be primarily about sex. “You haven’t been working. You’ve been doing your stupid memes and just fucking around,” Satan tells him in one moment.

“You know you can’t resist this,” Trump boasts, with yet another flash of the micropenis.

But even if South Park’s creators are equating Trump to the former Iraqi dictator (Satan says at one point that he reminds him a lot of his ex), they are also allowing some of the president’s most idiosyncratic qualities to shine through. Over the course of the episode, he threatens to sue anyone who displeases him, from the unhappy South Park residents to a painter working on an unflattering portrait of him that features yet another appearance of the micropenis. (Recall that the real Trump recently became preoccupied with a portrait of him he didn’t find flattering that hung in Colorado’s statehouse, prompting it to be replaced.) Even Trump’s White House on the show takes inspiration from the tackiness of the real one, with paintings throughout depicting Trump riding tanks, having sex with sheep or models of Air Force One, and posing naked against a dirty cubicle wall. In another scene, Trump appears to be hosting a MAGA tailgate in the White House gardens, where women with filler-pumped lips and in Trump-themed bikinis dine on cheeseburgers, cans of Coke, and PBR. At one point, Kid Rock can be seen with groupies, while a person who appears to be Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene relaxes in a pool on a Trump floatie. And, yes, Epstein gets his requisite mention; Satan, uncomfortable with the rumors on social media, tells Trump at one point: “It’s weird that whenever it comes up, you just tell everyone to relax.”

The timing of the episode is shocking for several reasons. For one, it’s incredible that an episode about schools kowtowing to Trump aired the very same day that Columbia University did so. But most stunning is that the episode was released the very same week that Stone and Parker reached a $1.5 billion streaming deal with Paramount for the South Park streaming rights and the commitment to produce 10 new episodes a year for the next five years.* After “Sermon on the Mount” aired, Dylan Byers, the media reporter for Puck, tweeted that it was “hard to think of anything more defiant in media & entertainment recently” than the South Park creators “going scorched earth” on a company right after inking a massive deal with it.

Indeed, Stone and Parker seem quite aware that this episode might go too far, airing as it has after the cancellation of Trump critic Colbert and Paramount’s decision to settle a ridiculous lawsuit the president brought against CBS’s 60 Minutes for $16 million. (There is widespread speculation that both moves were done simply to get merger approval from the Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission for Skydance, which is controlled by the son of Trump ally Larry Ellison, to take over Paramount.) Wednesday’s episode featured numerous jokes about this perhaps being the episode that might end the show for good—a warning delivered in a sermon at the show’s climax by none other than Jesus Christ. “I didn’t want to come back and be in the school, but I had to because it was part of a lawsuit and the agreement with Paramount,” Jesus tells South Park residents through gritted teeth. “The guy can do whatever he wants now that someone backed down.”

In a highly meta warning, he adds: “You guys saw what happened to CBS? Well, guess who owns CBS? Paramount! You really want to end up like Colbert?! You guys have got to stop being stupid. Just shut up or we’re going to get canceled, you idiots.”

The message isn’t just self-referential and funny; it’s also deeply astute. Indeed, it features some of the most cutting analysis of the truly surreal legal landscape the Supreme Court has left us with when it comes to Trump. “If someone has the power of the presidency, and also has the power to sue and take bribes, then he can do anything to anyone,” Jesus warns. “It’s the fucking president, dude! All of you shut the fuck up or South Park is over!” (Presumably, Stone and Parker also meant South Park the show.)

Ultimately, the townspeople of South Park decide to follow Paramount and Columbia’s lead by settling with Trump for $3.5 million—money, the mayor casually suggests, that can come from funding cuts to schools, hospitals, and roads. But in another twist that echoes the free airtime Trump said he secured in his extortionate settlement from CBS, South Park is required to produce a bunch of pro-Trump content. The result that Stone and Parker happily show us depicts an A.I.-generated version of Trump wandering in the desert like Jesus, slowly shedding his clothes until he is writhing naked in the sand. Then, his anthropomorphic micropenis—complete with beady eyes—tells those watching at home that he endorses this message. “His penis is teeny-tiny,” the ad’s narrator states, “but his love for us is large.”

It remains to be seen what the fallout will be from South Park’s masterclass in parody and trolling. But it’s clear that if this truly marks the beginning of the end, then Stone and Parker are ready. In the episode’s final scene, Cartman has enlisted the hapless Butters in a suicide pact, depressed as he is that wokeness is dead and there’s nothing left to laugh at. “Oh, I think I might be going,” Butters says, as the pair try unsuccessfully to kill themselves by inhaling the nonexistent tailpipe smoke from an electric car.

“Yes,” Cartman replies. “Sweet death is about to come.”

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