A few big things happened in the news, leading up to South Park‘s season premiere on Wednesday night. The Jeffrey Epstein story exploded in the news, with a series of damning revelations about his relationship with Donald Trump. CBS announced that Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s late-night show would end next spring, ahead of parent company Paramount’s merger with Skydance. And the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, ended a public contract dispute by agreeing to a $1.5 billion deal for more South Park, and also to move its archive over to Paramount+.
All of that led up to South Park‘s 27th season premiere on Wednesday night, when the show went scorched Earth on Donald Trump, as well as on Paramount, the settlement the company agreed to with the president over a 60 Minutes segment.
The episode has Eric Cartman upset that he can no longer listen to National Public Radio, which he enjoys listening to because he likes hearing liberals cry, due to the budget cuts in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. The episode also shows Trump literally in bed with Satan — in a callback to a bit South Park did with Saddam Hussein, in their 1999 Bigger Longer and Uncut movie — and just like the old Saddam conceit, the joke is that compared to Trump, Satan is the good guy, making insinuations about the president’s relationship with Epstein.
Overall, Trump is depicted in the episode as an unhinged lunatic, decorating the White House with nude paintings of himself, threatening to sue everyone in the world, and pushing Christianity while continuing to engage in a libertine lifestyle.
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It led up to this fake campaign commercial, including some disturbing (fake) nudity:
I am 💀! South Park just went in on Trump.
Please share before it’s taken down. Pffft!🤣 pic.twitter.com/DYWiyvDa1H
— Eddie Smith (@eddsmitty) July 24, 2025
Titled “Sermon on the ‘Mount,” it was the show’s first new episode in two years, and one notable thing was that while South Park spent the last several years skewering “wokeness,” mostly through the character of “PC Principal,” the new episode has pivoted to Trump-bashing, even depicting PC Principal as moving right, and rebranding as “Power Christian Principal.” Cartman later concludes that “woke is dead,” and is led into an existential crisis, since he’s no longer able to shock people by being offensive.
For most of the Trump era, the show has depicted teacher Mr. Garrison as something of a Trump analogue, rather than featuring the actual Trump as a character. But that changed in the new episode.
The politics of South Park have always been somewhat idiosyncratic, which has upset both the right and the left at various times over the years.
“We hate conservatives but we really [expletive] hate liberals,” the South Park creators once said, near the beginning of the show’s run. Bu in the old Archie Bunker tradition, it’s far from rare to see people on social media sharing old clips of Eric Cartman being racist or antisemitic in a particularly idiotic way, not realizing Cartman is the butt of the joke.
Trump, as of Thursday morning, hadn’t reacted to the episode. But considering how many conservative fans South Park has collected in recent years, the reaction is likely to be severe.
Photo courtesy of X screenshot.
