I hadn’t reconnected with “South Park” in ages. How long had it been? I dug around and found a Record-Eagle column I wrote about the series that also began with me saying I hadn’t checked in on the series for several years, and that was back in 2016.
But once again, my phone was blowing up about it, both from social media chatter and people I had first discovered the show with in high school asking if I was seeing the newest episode.
I was not, but the internet soon informed me that I was missing a vicious satire on the Trump administration, the sort of broadside that the rest of pop culture suddenly seems reluctant or afraid to produce.
Two weeks ago, the famously potty-mouthed animated Comedy Central series returned for its 27th season, following a two-year hiatus, and immediately planted its flag within the rancorous political landscape of 2025.
It would probably be easier to list the hot-button issues that didn’t factor into the episode, “Sermon on the Mount,” which found the show’s most pointedly offensive character, Cartman, bemoaning a cultural backlash to wokeness that has left him with no politically correct sensibilities to confront.
It introduced President Trump as a character — who happens to be literally in bed with Satan and in possession of freakishly small genitalia — in a story that references the Jeffrey Epstein files, the defunding of NPR, trade wars over tariffs and the administration’s lawsuits against media organizations.
The episode’s timing was either terrible or impeccable. “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had just finalized a $1.5 billion deal for the show’s streaming rights with Paramount.
The studio, which owns CBS, weeks earlier had announced it was ending “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” for reasons it claimed were financial but were widely seen as political, since the company is finalizing a merger that requires approval from the federal government, and Colbert is a Trump critic.
Live-viewing numbers doubled for “South Park’s” next episode, which went even harder. The kids’ school counselor, Mr. Mackey, suddenly unemployed and desperate for work, walks into an ICE recruitment center. He’s shown a training video in which Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem shoots puppies as her elaborate makeup job deteriorates.
Mackey is immediately given a gun, put into a van and sent onto the streets to round up anybody who looks “suspicious,” ending with a raid on a “Dora the Explorer” live performance. Trump, reappearing with a supplicant miniature version of J.D. Vance, approves.
“South Park” has always worked on a quick turnaround, often inserting references and plot points based on events happening days before an episode airs, so it would have been unusual for the show not to mention the current political temperature.
But the gutsiness was nonetheless striking, as was the response. The White House issued a statement calling “South Park” a “fourth-rate show” that “hasn’t been relevant in 20 years.” Why address it, then? Clearly it has struck a nerve.
The conventional wisdom about pop culture in the Trump 2.0 era is that we’re now experiencing a widespread backlash to the “woke” politics of the last 10 years or so. “South Park” doesn’t fit this narrative, just as it did not conform to the liberal pieties of the Obama era.
“South Park” was post-woke before “woke” even registered as a concept. Even during the last decade, Parker and Stone operated with uncancelable impunity, skewering socially radioactive topics that nobody else would touch.
They have unique credibility in this moment because their politics are libertarian-coded and reactionary to whatever the dominant cultural narrative seems to be. If the worlds of entertainment and comedy are indeed moving rightward, as seems to be the case, why would “South Park” follow along?
Poor Cartman might be listless as cultural progressivism finds itself in retreat, but his creators, as usual, are right where they need to be.