The creators of South Park didn’t set out to spend a whole season roasting Donald Trump and his administration.
But, as Trey Parker told The New York Times in a joint interview with co-creator Matt Stone, “It’s like the government is just in your face everywhere you look.” And though they considered turning a blind eye to MAGA after the season opener, “there’s no getting away from this,” he said.
“Whether it’s the actual government or whether it is all the podcasters and the TikToks and the YouTubes and all of that, and it’s just all political and political because it’s more than political. It’s pop culture.” Parker added, “It’s not that we got all political. It’s that politics became pop culture.”
Pop culture and our societal “taboos” is where the show has always lived, Stone explained, and Trump’s second term created a vacuum left by fear of retaliation for speaking out against the litigious administration. “Oh, that’s where the taboo is? Over there? OK, then we’re over there,” Stone said. “Trey and I are attracted to that like flies to honey.”
The show was approaching its 27th season just as Comedy Central parent company Paramount was nearing its merger with Skydance—a move that required approval from Trump’s FCC. So skewering Trump in its “Sermon on the Mount” season premiere was the perfect opportunity to show their “independence,” the creators explained. Their impending five-year, $1.25 billion contract renewal with the network also hung in the balance before the deal and merger finally closed. Naked Trump was the show’s first move when the season premiered only hours later.
“We just had to show our independence somehow,” Stone said of that first episode. Though they’d planned to move on from Trump after that, MAGA just kept dominating the national conversation—so more no-holds barred roastings of his administration continued. The series’ special Halloween episode, “The Woman in the Hat,” depicts U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi as having feces on her nose whenever she praises the president.
“We basically start with a song and we don’t know where the album’s going to take us,” Parker said, but that first episode revealed a “vein of comedy.” Stone and Parker insist that aren’t on either side of the political conversation.
“We’re just very down-the-middle guys,” Parker said. “Any extremists of any kind we make fun of. We did it for years with the woke thing. That was hilarious to us. And this is hilarious to us,” he added, as he explained that the series will eventually move on from Trump. “Next year will be different. If there’s one thing we know, it is that our show will be a lot longer than theirs. So, we just got to do this for now.”
In the meantime, Stone and Parker say they’ve been given free reign to go after the administration, with no objections from MAGA-friendly Skydance owner David Ellison. “I know with the Colbert thing and all the Trump stuff, people think certain things, but they’re letting us do whatever we want, to their credit,” Stone said.
