South Park is ICE-cool on Trump

In this week’s South Park, the second episode since Paramount paid Trey Parker and Matt Stone eleventy billion dollars to make content, Parker and Stone absolutely and brilliantly rip the Trump administration to shreds. Unlike our late-night comedy hosts, who don’t have the chops for anything other than name-calling and juvenile slap fights with the President, South Park gets to the heart of darkness of the Trump administration, and also to what’s so funny about our new political age.

Not only does the episode feature a savage attack on Trump, depicting him as Mr. Roarke at Mar-a-Lago as Fantasy Island, it also shows J.D. Vance as a tiny Tattoo, who Trump literally kicks out of the way when he gets annoying. There’s actually a bedroom scene where Satan, Donald Trump’s lover, is reading in bed and J.D./Tattoo asks Trump if he wants him to “oil Satan’s butthole.” My God.

But that’s just a side gag at the end of an episode that savagely portrays Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as an evil sadist who enjoys blowing out the brains of puppies on camera. She also has a hideous makeup face that can slide off her skull and take on a life of its own, shades of The Substance. There’s an ICE raid, including guidance counselor Mr. Mackey, who’s trying to “make his nut” by arresting illegal immigrants, on a Dora the Explorer Live! concert. Later, ICE stages a raid on heaven itself, where Noem tells ICE agents to only grab Latino angels: “If they’re brown, bring them down.”

If that weren’t enough, the B-story involves Eric Cartman getting into a pissing contest with another student to see who can be the most vicious conservative YouTube influencer, owning liberal college students in live debates, à la White House booster Charlie Kirk. The parody manages to make Kirk look like a total chode while also making the woke college students he’s debating look like clueless idiots.

When South Park is on target, and it often is, it’s a vicious over-the-top indictment of the way we live now. Parker and Stone are the scatological satiric geniuses of our time, and they’ve figured out a way into the whirlwind of Trump’s second term. As Trump said himself in a ridiculous weekend post, woke is dead, being a Republican is cool again. That also means that anti-woke Republicanism is now the language of the establishment. And the whole point of satirical comedy is to knock the establishment down a peg.

This time, the establishment, though maybe not Trump himself, is embracing the satire. J.D. Vance, responding to a cartoon depicting him as a servile sex dwarf, tweeted, “We’ll I’ve finally made it.” For Charlie Kirk, the South Park episode is the best thing that’s ever happened to his brand. He posted a clip from the episode where Cartman receives a nomination for the “Charlie Kirk Award For Young MasterDebaters.”

How do we know we live in a free country? When a cartoon can depict a president as having a gay love affair with Satan, and that president’s literal and figurative Number Two says “more, please.” It’s a good sign that we live in the best of times. Just watch your back if you’re at a Dora Live! concert, or if you’re a brown person in heaven.