Of all the dubious achievements of Donald Trump’s time in office, the most surprising may be this: the US president has made South Park relevant again. The long-running animation – just days ago signing a record-breaking $1.5bn deal with Paramount to produce 50 new episodes over the next five years – used its long-awaited season premiere to launch a characteristically pugnacious critique of the president.
Over the past weeks and months, Trump’s antagonism towards his country’s arts and media sector has intensified. Part of this has manifested in legislation – such as the cuts to PBS and NPR, the US’s public service broadcasters, which were passed by congress earlier this month. The National Endowment for the Arts has undergone drastic cuts this year, slashing government investment in the humanities at a local level. At other times, Trump’s ire has taken the form of litigation: Trump last year sued Paramount, the parent company of the network CBS, over what he contended was misleading editing in an interview with his opponent Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 election. This month, legal action was also launched against The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp and Rupert Murdoch, over the publication of the president’s alleged birthday letter to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The fight with Paramount has an extra wrinkle: a proposed $8bn merger with Skydance Media, which requires the approval of the FCC, the federal regulatory body, to go ahead. Much of Paramount’s recent decision-making has been interpreted as an attempt to pre-emptively pander to the forthcoming owners, and to the FCC, now under the leadership of Trump’s hand-picked chairman Brendan Carr. This includes the announcement earlier this month that Stephen Colbert’s popular TV stalwart The Late Show, long vocal in its criticism of the president, was not being renewed beyond next year. It was also announced that Paramount had agreed to settle what some have called the “patently unconstitutional” Trump lawsuit for $16m – prompting claims of “bribery” from Democratic senators.
Titled “Sermon on the Mount”, the new episode of South Park folds these various controversies into one unwieldy blob of satire. One minute, you have South Park’s breakout character, foul-mouthed schoolboy Eric Cartman, bemoaning the defunding of NPR. Later in the episode, Trump sues the town of South Park, with the figure of Jesus Christ – sent by Trump to impose himself in the local schools – telling the locals: “You guys saw what happened to CBS! You really want to end up like Colbert?” The episode ends with the town being instructed to pay Trump $3.5m, and record a PSA of “pro-Trump messaging”.
These are, at least, the more tasteful criticisms of Trump that South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone deploy. Elsewhere, they resort to sledgehammer irreverence, South Park’s usual weapon of choice. In one scene, Trump has a sexual encounter with Satan; another sees the cartoon president bare his genitals and reveal that he has a micropenis. Rumours that Trump appears on the widely discussed “Epstein list” are also mentioned.
It’s significant, perhaps, that South Park should enter its new era on Paramount with an episode that’s so unapologetically anti-Trump. Where much of the entertainment industry has always skewed left-wing, South Park has always teetered somewhere in the middle, spitting its acid in both directions. It has a storied history of shunning political correctness, while never tipping over into right-wing reactionism. Parker and Stone’s comic ethos – that both sides of any debate are usually just as fatuous as each other – has seen the show, and its creators, weather substantial criticism down the years. But they’ve stuck to it. South Park is, if not a voice of reason, then at the very least, a voice of uniform scepticism.
US president Donald Trump, as depicted in ‘South Park’ (Paramount/Comedy Central)
You have to wonder what the bosses at Paramount are thinking right now; South Park hasn’t just bitten the hand that feeds it, but torn it clean off the arm. (And in any case, it won’t need feeding again for another five years.) The White House went so far as to issue a statement hitting out at South Park, branding it a “fourth-rate show” that “hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread” – criticisms that might hold more water if the ink on a billion-dollar licensing deal wasn’t still wet. Parker and Stone were unrepentant during an appearance at Comic-Con after the episode aired, while an administration source told Deadline that the president was “seething”.
There’s a lesson in here, when it comes to Trump. For all the legislative power he wields, and the not-inconsiderable influence he may hold over parts of the entertainment industry, a war with television is not one he can win. The more he tries to impose himself, the more mud will be flung his way. And some of it, inevitably, will stick.
