South Park Turns Up the Heat: Season 27 Goes After Trump
If you thought South Park had lost its edge after 26 seasons, think again. The show's 27th season opener, called ‘Sermon on the 'Mount,’ doesn’t just poke fun at former president Donald Trump—it rips off the whole bandage. The episode is packed to the brim with gags about Trump’s private parts and high-profile courtroom antics, making it one of the show’s riskiest political lampoons yet.
Forget subtlety. The writers went all in, giving audiences jaw-dropping moments like a deepfaked Trump standing nude in the desert, as a voiceover deadpans, ‘‘His penis is teeny tiny, but his love for us is large.’’ It’s South Park, so of course no detail is spared: the show uses both animation and live-action shots, gleefully making things as awkward—and explicit—as possible.
Aiming Straight at Trump’s Legal Habits
The ridicule doesn’t stop at his appearance. South Park gives Trump’s courtroom strategy the same savage treatment. In true over-the-top fashion, the episode has a fictional Trump slap the whole town with a $5 billion lawsuit just for criticizing him. That’s a not-so-subtle nod to his actual $10 billion legal battle with Paramount, the company that distributes South Park. The creators clearly had a field day taking real legal headlines and cranking them up to South Park-level absurdity.
Eventually, the residents of South Park cave, settling for $3.5 million and rolling out painfully awkward pro-Trump ads—echoes of Paramount’s real $16 million settlement, just with more fart jokes and fourth-wall-breaking gags. The showrunners never miss a chance to tie real-world media drama back into their universe, keeping the satire fresh and razor-sharp.
One wild sequence even pairs Trump as Satan’s lover in bed, a callback for die-hard fans to the infamous Saddam-and-the-Devil gags from South Park’s early years. It’s classic South Park, mixing pop culture, political controversy, and a willingness to push every boundary.
What about censorship? The answer’s not what you might expect. During a no-holds-barred Comic-Con panel for 2025, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone revealed that their network wanted to blur Trump’s explicit scenes. Their response? Absolutely not. They insisted on airing the episode uncensored, sticking to South Park’s decades-old ethos: If you’re going to make fun of someone, don’t pull punches.
Getting this episode out was messier than usual thanks to ongoing trouble at Paramount, which recently merged with Skydance. The creators called the process a ‘s---show’ and blamed the two-week premiere delay on nonstop production headaches swirling around the merger.
South Park knows how to make a statement—and this time, it’s as much about network drama as about Trump himself. The episode wraps things up with tongue-in-cheek PSAs that double down: Sure, Trump’s anatomy may be ridiculed, but his ‘love’ for the country is presented as ‘large.’ Only South Park could get away with balancing this kind of crudeness with stinging cultural commentary.
