Given the whip-fast paced political news cycle, it may be challenging to recall the bleak vibe shift that rattled the nation across the first half of 2025 amid Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office. An inauguration featuring a Nazi salute from the world’s wealthiest man gave way to the signing of a staggering number of sweeping executive orders that rescinded many of the previous administration’s actions and zeroed in on vulnerable members of the working class. Over the subsequent weeks, news of Trump testing his power with the courts became quotidian and by June, the chilling effects of the sacking of those who questioned the fairly elected president brought about an unheard-of level of silence from the chattering class.
Where could one turn in this moment? Certainly not to the newly neutered Democrats whose collective silence was as much of a shock as the waves of ICE raids or peppering of lawsuits against major media outlets.
Who will be a patriot in this moment and say something? Well, South Park.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone have indicated that, as this all was unfolding, the show’s creators may have gotten to the task a bit sooner, had their post-Skydance-Paramount merger $1.5 billion, 50-episode deal with Paramount closed sooner (it was held up by the corporate sale which, incidentally, was Trump’s to rescind).
Post-corporate deal, it was late July when they brought South Park — their beloved, decades-running hit animated series — back to Comedy Central after a two-year hiatus. With the return of their show and the confidence that likely comes when you’ve been buoyed up to the billionaire class, Parker and Stone brought an agenda to ripping Trump, his deeply inexperienced cabinet heads and the new culture he’s ushered into public acceptance in America.
Trump was a topic the show refused to address directly during his first term, instead opting to use a longtime character as a stand-in for the president in his first term; he was already an unparodiable parody of himself, the creators’ logic seemed to indicate when questioned about that decision.
But this go-around, and their fast and wild success at the task, led to an absolute roasting of the administration. The show has delivered a send-up of Trump that’s been disgustingly crass, precisely on-point and sidesplittingly funny over the two back-to-back seasons. The second season’s conclusion on Wednesday night was perhaps a series-best episode that has left almost everyone on the Internet satisfied is another commendable feat.
But it’s the longtime comedy writing pals’ show of bravery — re-emerging at this dark moment that had become far too silent as the fear of what wrath Trump may bring spread — that should be considered a true act of patriotism; they shook out of that fear and told us the emperor had no clothes.
Parker and Stone have indicated that it was a fear of Trump that lit a fire under the two longtime friends and creative partners, who brought their crass animated short about four mountain town pals and their gross adventures to Comedy Central in the mid-1990s and managed to ink an initial deal. As season 27 rolled out fortnightly and chilling effects shot through multiple media tentacles after the Sept. 10 killing of political pundit Charlie Kirk, the South Park guys seemed to be undeterred — even as late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was taken off the air for a mention of Kirk and the GOP.
“Trey and I are attracted to that like flies to honey,” Stone told The New York Times in a rare interview in November. “Oh, that’s where the taboo is? Over there? OK, then we’re over there.”
They didn’t start the season 27-28 run with even a lick of subtlety — in fact, some of the moments in the July 26 season 27 premiere episode were the most raucous aired in years. By the end of the premiere’s first act, we’d been introduced to the flapping-head, cut-out South Park version of President Donald Trump and learned that, like Saddam Hussein in the show’s heyday and 1999 feature-length treasure, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, the president is in a sexual relationship with the ever-insecure and unlucky-in-love prince of darkness, Satan. By the end of the episode, Trump sued the town of South Park and then, in a moment that quickly rippled across the web, a PSA featuring a real-life Trump look-alike collapsed naked in the desert while looking on at his small, talking penis.
The second episode, featuring the animated versions of a dog-massacring Kristi Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security, as well as Kirk, weeks before he was shot to death at a speaking event, received a second angry and condescending condemnation from the White House, which had claimed the show “hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread.” Trump, however, remained silent on his new South Park portrayal and has yet to say a word; speculation has centered on his penchant for only fighting winning battles and possibly his respect for billionaires.
As the weeks went on (and the produced-on-the-fly show began to air fortnightly), the Trump character’s antics grew increasingly selfish and reckless, even vindictive, as he attempted to abort his and Satan’s love child or otherwise plot the unborn hellspawn’s death. The show cycled through current trends (the Labubu craze and tween 6,7 fad provided memorable arcs) in the titular town’s plotlines. But the action had little forward momentum or change that didn’t reset by Wednesday’s final scene. The remainder of the season brought in and roundly mocked several new faces in the Trump administration; Pam Bondi’s devotion to Trump earned her a recurring and hard-to-remove shit stain on her nose, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth got an official theme song set to the tune of ”Highway to the Danger Zone”(Pete Hegseth/is a fucking douche).
The gamble Paramount, Parker and Stone took — which wasn’t much of a risk to the comic duo, at least, as they seem to truly fearless regarding Trump — paid off in ratings that smashed prior records for the show. The season 27 premiere in July 2025 garnered nearly 6 million cross-platform viewers, marking the show’s biggest linear premiere rating since 1999. The second episode of that season grew even further to 6.2 million viewers.
On Wednesday, season 28 concluded the Trump-Satan “romance” plotline in a clever feat that combined pitch-dark humor, pathos, some South Park canon nostalgia, a happy ending and a Jeffrey Epstein gag. While the wave of Trump administration bashing has now concluded for the time being, the Teflon Don character, like one of South Park’s four child heroes, also gets a classic sitcom reset once his plot concludes. Perhaps Trump will be back on the show in the next season — or maybe the tension that led the show’s masterminds to bringing the president onto the show has now been removed from the air. For now, we can hopefully have a laugh at, and maybe even with, a sharp parody of our elected officials. And we actually have a couple of billionaires to thank for it.
