Et tu, Brute? It is with profound sadness that I report the death of a once-cherished cultural touchstone: South Park. Cause of death: Trump Derangement Syndrome. The decline began a decade ago, around Season 19, with the introduction of PC Principal and a lurch into serialized storytelling.
Still, even in those uneven years, the show retained its anchoring instinct: Comedy came first and was never afflicted by ideology. That is what makes the creators’ recent justification so dispiriting. “It’s not that we got all political,” Trey Parker told the New York Times. “It’s that politics became pop culture.” This, apparently, explains why the past two seasons have fixated almost exclusively on President Donald Trump and his administration.
The difference is not merely topical. It is tonal. South Park has never shied away from vulgarity (the firebrand cartoon is certainly not for everyone), but it was always rooted in a worthwhile punchline. Increasingly, however, the show has indulged in vulgarity for vulgarity’s sake: Pam Bondi smeared with feces, JD Vance carrying on a romantic affair with Trump, Satan returning as Trump’s codependent paramour.
Meanwhile, the four boys who once formed the show’s emotional core have been relegated to cameo status, their adventures now tertiary to a sprawling Resistance-era soap opera. In South Park’s heyday, political allegory was subtle and filtered through its world; consider 2004’s “Douche and Turd,” a single-episode riff on the Bush-Kerry election that still revolved around the characters’ elementary school. Today, we get multi-season tirades in place of sharp satire.
When Season 27 premiered, portraying Trump as a resurrected Saddam Hussein analogue, complete with Satan as his jilted lover, I was naive enough to hope this was a one-off gesture intended to put to rest the asinine notion that late night host Stephen Colbert was fired for “criticizing Trump.” Instead, it became clear this would be the show’s new organizing principle. It has abandoned everything that once set it above the late night monoculture. South Park has become a show you visit to hear MSNBC-level monologues with crasser delivery.
What makes this shift especially perplexing is the creators’ insistence that their new direction is somehow rebellious. In the same New York Times interview, Matt Stone claims he and Parker “sensed a fear of speaking out against the administration” and that “new taboos had emerged.” This notion is patently delusional given their own history. Parker and Stone lampooned Trump relentlessly in 2015’s Season 19 through the Mr. Garrison surrogate. If mocking Trump were a career-ending taboo, where were the gallows then?
To their credit, glimmers of the old show remain. Its spoofing of crypto grifters (Hawk Tuah girl) and AI-generated deepfakes offers sharp observations of contemporary absurdity. But these ideas exist only as side quests orbiting the Trump–Satan baby storyline. If South Park is ever to be made great again (to borrow a phrase), it must invert this formula. The boys should be the story; the politics, if present at all, should be mocked through their lens.
Compounding the problem is the show’s abandonment of the “equal-opportunity offender” ethos the creators claim to uphold. There was, bizarrely, an entire episode blaming Benjamin Netanyahu for rising antisemitism in America — an Al Jazeera–esque moral framing wildly out of character for a show that (outside Saddam, bin Laden, a few dictators, and Canada) rarely waded into geopolitics at all.
The show took a swing at Charlie Kirk, only to drop the plotline entirely after his tragic murder. But if podcast punditry is fair game, where is the satire of Hasan Piker — currently enjoying glossy PR profiles in the New York Times and Vanity Fair? What about Zohran Mamdani, the trust-fund socialist newly elected mayor of New York? Or, for that matter, anything resembling a joke about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) or the House’s Hamas caucus of Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)?
These are genuine taboos and the ones late night hosts will not touch, no matter how many self-inflicted gaffes they generate. Yet Stone and Parker seem fixated on scolding one Trump Cabinet member after another.
Even more conspicuously absent is any commentary on President Joe Biden, a man whose declining cognition became a national scandal only after he left office, or Kamala Harris, whose oratorical style consists of word salads punctuated by nervous laughter. Defenders of the show often cite streaming-rights litigation as the reason South Park skipped the Biden years.
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But Parker and Stone undercut that excuse themselves in a 2024 interview, admitting they were “exhausted” with politics and simply opted out of the election cycle. What changed between then and now? They never say. But the result is unmistakable: A show that once skewered cultural absurdities now indulges them.
And so, we arrive at present-day South Park, a once-great institution hollowed out by its own narrative compulsions. Comedy becomes stale and dies when it becomes consumed by a single target for too long. The tragedy is not that South Park mocks Trump; it is that Trump is all it appears to know how to mock anymore.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.