South Park’s Trump Takedown Joins a Proud American Tradition
The Season 27 premiere of South Park—the animated Comedy Central show famous for skewering public figures with crude and topical humor—trained its sights on President Donald Trump with the message that the would-be emperor has no clothes. Literally.
The episode depicts an out-of-control president who threatens everyone in sight with frivolous lawsuits, including the residents of South Park, merely for questioning him. Trump’s cartoon doppelgӓnger cows the news program 60 Minutes into craven servility, whose reporters tremble when covering the fictitious case against South Park and take care to assure viewers what a “great guy” the president is.
And that about does it for the tasteful part.
The show’s creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, portray a naked Trump with a tiny penis in bed with Satan, who asks about Trump’s place in the Epstein files before rebuffing the president’s sexual advances. The episode concludes with what appears to be an AI-generated public service video—inspired by a concession Trump claims to have extracted in the Paramount settlement—showing an obese Trump disrobing as he lumbers through a desert, ending with a close-up of his tiny talking penis (who endorses the ad).
The White House isn’t happy. Assistant Press Secretary Taylor Rogers said South Park “hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.” To be fair, perhaps Rogers didn’t know that Parker and Stone had just signed a $1.5 billion deal with Paramount for five more seasons of the award-winning show.
The feeble jab about relevance is laughable. The premiere packed in several hot-button issues in just over 20 minutes: Trump’s addiction to baseless litigation, his abuse of regulatory power to force settlements, the spineless corporations that give in, the firing of Stephen Colbert, Trump’s relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, the tariff dispute with Canada, and more.
This kind of satire has long been a potent antidote to political corruption in America, perhaps best illustrated by the downfall of Tammany Hall, a corrupt Democratic machine that dominated New York City after the Civil War. It was run by the notorious William “Boss” Tweed, whose openly corrupt organization, “The Ring,” collected millions of dollars in illegal graft. Newspapers had covered the scandal, but the public really took notice because of the work of Thomas Nast, the political cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly.
The Supreme Court has described Nast as “probably the greatest American cartoonist to date,” whose sustained attack on Boss Tweed and his organization “stands alone in the history of American
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