The real reason South Park kept mocking Trump

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had only intended to feature President Donald Trump in a single episode, but ironically, it was the angry reaction from the White House and MAGA loyalists that inspired them to keep his administration in the crosshairs for the ensuing two seasons, and now the next one. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the notorious comedic duo revealed this during a promotional event earlier this week, where they discussed the show’s 27^th and 28^th seasons, which scored record-high ratings and secured national headlines thanks to their sharp, often bawdy take-downs of Trump and his cabinet.

“We were just going to do that first show with the Trump stuff,” explained Parker. “We laid into him so hard, and the thing became: ‘Well, who’s the bully now?’ It became this just totally juvenile joke of like, ‘We’re not gonna stop. We’re going to do it every single week.’ Even when everyone’s like, ‘OK, guys, move on,’ [we’re] like, ‘Nope, we’re not moving on. We’re going to keep going, going, going.' That became the joke.”

Funny enough, before season 27, the series had been on hiatus for one year specifically because its showrunners did not want to cover Trump and the 2024 election.

"We’ve tried to do South Park through four or five presidential elections, and it is such a hard thing to — it’s such a mind scramble, and it seems like it takes outsized importance,” Stone said at the time, explaining that the election was "obviously...f---ing important, but it kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun." What’s more, they didn’t “know what more we could possibly say about Trump.”

While the show had, during the preceding years, teased Trump via a lookalike character, it wasn’t until the first episode of season 27 in July 2025 that South Park would introduce Trump himself. The episode skewered Trump, portraying him in a literal relationship with Satan, and showing a deepfake AI version of the president exposing his genitals. The following day, a spokesperson for the White House called the show “fourth-rate,” saying that it “hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.”

In response, the showrunners delivered a mock-apology, and the show’s ratings soared to the highest since 2018. South Park famously produces its episodes on a weekly basis rather than in advance, so amid federal pushback and sky-high ratings, its writers decided to continue hammering on Trump and his allies, lambasting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and a miniature version of Vice President JD Vance.

Park admitted, “To me, that was the whole season, was that they kept reacting, and we were like, ‘Well, God damn it. All right, we’ll do it some more.'”

The show also notably mocked FCC Chair Branden Carr, who was then ramping up his attack on Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and other media entities critical of Trump. Both South Park and Colbert aired under the parent company Paramount, which announced that it was cancelling the latter’s show out of what many speculated was an attempt to appease the president. South Park ran the first Trump episode just days after the announcement, knowing that there could be real consequences.

As Stone explained, “The thing that felt powerful about it wasn’t just that we’re going to say this thing or we’re going to go there [but] that we’re going to throw our show on the table. We don’t care. We don’t give a f---. We say it all the time. We’re not irresponsible, but we’ll go back to Colorado. We don’t give a f---.”