First off, I have a (censored) language warning, in the sense that while this post will engage in the usual censorship of naughty, naughty words, I will still be describing stuff that is a little gross, anatomically. And it’s kind of funny. But if you are offended by discussions of anatomy, turn back now.
And, of course, there will be full SPOILERS for the latest episode of 'South Park,' called ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ so be warned. Because those spoilers are going to start coming pretty quickly after this warning.
As we mentioned yesterday, South Park just started its 27th season. I am a ‘cord cutter’ so I am never going to watch it on the night of, but I also have Paramount+ right now, so I can watch it the next day. The entire episode took aim at Donald Trump.
The gist of the story is that people in the town of South Park are upset that Trump is supposedly doing nothing but suing and arresting people, and also somehow forcing Christ in our schools. Like literally, their ‘recurring character’ version of Christ was being forced into their schools and even onto Stan Marsh’s lunch table. All of which is kind of disconnected from reality, but whatever.
One key thing to note is that they were taking aim at Trump himself, not Mr. Garrison as a proxy. If you watched the show during the first Trump term, Mr. Garrison took on an orangey hue and became basically their stand-in for Trump. But in this episode, they have a scene where everyone decides they need to go after the president, and an angry mob breaks into Mr. Garrison’s house, only for him to awkwardly explain that he isn’t the president.
No, Trump is the president, where they give him a cartoon body and a head that is clearly a composite of various photos of Trump, animated by making the whole top of his head flop around as they do with many celebrities (and Canadians, for some reason). And to say they are going hard on Trump is a bit of an understatement. And in addition to the language warning from the beginning, I will warn you here that this clip is NOT SAFE FOR WORK, featuring Trump’s head on a cartoon body getting naked, and showing the full … um … bait and tackle:
NEW: South Park targets President Trump over the Epstein files in their new episode, puts him in bed with Satan.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 24, 2025
The episode comes as South Park has just reportedly agreed to a 5 year, 50 episode, $1.5 billion deal with Paramount.
“The Epstein list? Are we still talking… pic.twitter.com/sE4zt2ONOu
The cut-off text:
'The Epstein list? Are we still talking about that?' South Park Trump was heard saying in the clip.
And there are a few things to unpack here.
First off, the entire episode strongly implies that Trump is actually Saddam Hussein in disguise. Yes, really. In the South Park universe, Saddam Hussein had a different life (and afterlife) than he did in the real world. To sum up most of the high points:
1) Saddam Hussein died much earlier than he did in real life during the Clinton Administration,
2) Then he went to hell,
3) In Hell, he became Satan’s lover,
4) He tried to start a war between Canada and the U.S. for reasons,
5) He turned out to be an abusive boyfriend, so Satan sent him to heaven (which is awful for Saddam because it is filled exclusively with Mormons (and that’s a very long story)),
6) He started stockpiling weapons of mass destruction in Heaven, and
7) He secretly took over Canada only to end up being killed (again) at about the same time he was killed in real life.
Thus, when Satan says that Trump reminds him of a past boyfriend, it is extremely heavily suggesting that Trump is actually Saddam in disguise. Trump even says ‘about’ as ‘aboot’ as they do up in Canada, suggesting Saddam might have picked up that pronunciation while temporarily being in charge of Canada. Or maybe Saddam is secretly Canadian in the South Park universe? The voice sounds so similar to Saddam's, I can’t tell the difference—indeed, Matt Stone is credited with Satan’s voice in their movie ‘South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut’, and I am 99.99% sure it is his voice behind this version of Trump. And he has very similar vocal mannerisms, like saying ‘relax’ all the time. And as if that’s not enough, the first time you see their new version of Trump, the prime minister of Canada accuses him of acting like a ‘dictator from the Middle East.’
It’s all so obviously telegraphed that Trump is going to turn out to be secretly Saddam Hussein or something like that, that … I suspect that it's going to turn out to be something else. Because at this point, it's so predictable that I feel like it's probably a head fake. But that is just a guess; I could be wrong.
The second thing to unpack is that Mr. Rugg doesn’t show probably the most offensive part of the scene to many people, where they make fun of the president’s… um…
— (((Aaron Walker))) (@AaronWorthing) July 25, 2025
In that scene, Trump stands up in bed and tries to get it on with Satan, showing off his tiny cartoon appendage. At another point, earlier in the episode, Satan says that it is so small that he can barely make it out. And the episode ends with a fake ad that looks remarkably realistic—probably created with AI, if I had to guess—where Trump wanders through the desert and gradually gets naked because he is overheated. This version of Trump is deeply unflattering, to say the least, and at one point, his appendage actually speaks and says: ‘I’m Donald J. Trump and I endorse this message.’ The final voice over in the fake ad even says Trump’s appendage ‘is teeny tiny.’ So, to say that Trump is portrayed unflatteringly is an understatement. I am pretty sure Democrats are using headlines like ‘South Park Destroyed Trump’ to describe it.
The overall point of the episode appears to be that Trump is making people afraid to speak out against him, as the left often claims, and to seemingly take a jab at Trump.
But my suspicion is that there is something even more meta going on here, because my mind goes back to the Mohammed Cartoon controversy. As you might recall, ‘South Park’ has occasionally featured Mohammed on the show in a minor role. Probably the funniest was when they introduced the ‘Super Best Friends,’ a direct parody of the classic cartoon ‘SuperFriends,’ only instead of D.C. Superheroes, the heroes were famous religious figures, including Mohammed, who had fire powers for some reason.
Then, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a bunch of cartoons depicting Mohammed, and there were global protests and, crucially, death threats. So then ‘South Park’ took on the controversy with a two-part episode called ‘Cartoon Wars’ where Mohammed was going to appear on ‘Family Guy,’ which was standing in for their own show in a meta sort of way. Then the people who make ‘South Park’ and the people who work at Comedy Central started getting death threats. Thus, when the time came to actually show Mohammed, ‘South Park’ sent the episode to Comedy Central with Mohammed in it, and Comedy Central decided to censor it. And they basically justified that decision by saying they were afraid.
So … terrorism works. That’s the message Comedy Central sent.
And not for nothing, but it was widely reported that the depiction of Mohammed was inoffensive. It just featured their version of Peter from ‘Family Guy’ recalling when Mohammed had a salmon hat, and there was a flashback to Mohammed giving him a salmon hat. I have seen an alleged clip showing the forbidden scene online and, if it’s genuine, there is nothing offensive about it, unless you believe it is inherently offensive to depict Mohammed at all. (And to the lunatics who were threatening Comedy Central, that was the case.)
Then ‘South Park’ revisited the issue again. For their 200th and 201st episodes, they revisited that issue again. And this time, not only did Comedy Central censor all images of Mohammed, but they also censored a long speech where they talk about how it is important to stand up to this kind of terrorism.
Indeed, at some point after that, Comedy Central, HBO Max, and now Paramount+ also removed the episode with the Super Best Friends from streaming, because it became retroactively too offensive to them.
And here’s the thing. I have long believed that part of what the creators of South Park were doing with those last two episodes was more akin to performance art than just making a show. I think behind the scenes, Parker and Stone said something like, ‘They wouldn’t show Mohammed before, but let’s try making it the subject of our 200th and 201st episodes. Let’s even include a speech where we call them cowards if they don’t show Mohammed. Then let’s see what they do.’ I think they were deliberately putting Comedy Central on the horns of a dilemma. Either they show the episode or stop this silly self-censorship. Or if they did censor it, they would look even worse than they did before.
However, Comedy Central did censor it. For Comedy Central, terrorism works. Think of the incentives that this creates.
And I suspect the makers of South Park are doing something similar here by going after Trump. I think they decided to test whether or not they could put out an episode that seems specifically designed to anger Trump.
So, I think this was a test akin to their second bite at the Mohammed cartoon controversy. I think they said to each other something like ‘let’s see if Comedy Central is willing to air it and if Paramount+ is willing to stream it.’ But I also think they are asking ‘can Trump take our absolutely savage mocking of him without suing us or retaliating in any other way?’
As for the last question, I think that Trump won’t bother except for raging on social media. Comedy is more protected than most forms of expression because it doesn’t even pretend to be the truth, so it can’t be treated as defamation, true threats, fraud, or many other categories of unprotected speech. Further, while I doubt he enjoyed the mockery, I don’t think Trump is as thin-skinned as the left thinks. Seriously, if he sued everyone who made fun of him, he’d have a minimum of 500 lawsuits going right now.
But by airing this episode without censorship by anyone else, they have pretty much destroyed the narrative that Paramount, CBS or Comedy Central are self-censoring. Indeed, at one point, their version of Jesus tells ‘South Park’ to back down, saying under his breath: ‘Do you want to end up like Colbert?’
But that’s just it, they haven’t ended up like Colbert, and I don’t think they will.
As the old saying goes: Actions speak louder than words. We know how Paramount, CBS, and Comedy Central behave when they are actually afraid. Currently, there is no legal way to watch those ‘Mohammed’ episodes, except perhaps if you have an old DVD collection of them—and I don’t think they ever released a DVD version of Cartoon Wars (I and II) or the 200th and 201st episodes. Paramount is excited to have ‘South Park’ on its streaming service, but those episodes are not there. They have episodes making fun of Mormons, Scientologists, Christians, Jews, multiple U.S. Presidents, and now Trump, who is supposed to be this big, scary threat to free speech. But they wouldn’t post an episode with even an inoffensive image of Mohammed.
So maybe this is actually the makers of ‘South Park’ showing off the hypocrisy of Comedy Central and Paramount. Perhaps at some point, they will revisit the Mohammed issue and ask Paramount if they are as brave as they claim to be?
Or maybe I am reading too much into things. Maybe they aren’t being as meta as I think. Maybe they really think Trump is scaring people into silence, and it is time to stand up to him. Maybe they even think Trump (or the fear of Trump) got Colbert pulled off the air.
But whatever Stone and Parker’s intentions are, again, actions speak louder than words. Comedy Central and Paramount+ showed ‘South Park’s’ attack on Trump, which means the issue isn’t any rule for Paramount (and the subsidiaries) that you can’t mock Trump. And that combines with other data to suggest that Colbert was not silenced either by Trump or the fear of Trump. Even the claim that Paramount was afraid of angering Trump during the merger is rebutted by the fact that the day after this episode aired, this happened:
Trump’s FCC finally lets two media companies merge
— Payal je (@JePayal26) July 25, 2025
Check out this article: https://t.co/iT2rWuNVl6
And other data points in the same direction. For instance, Colbert is being allowed to stay on the air another ten months. If Paramount didn’t like something Colbert was saying about Trump or Paramount, or anyone else, they wouldn’t give him ten months to keep saying it. No, if you are running a TV network and/or streaming service and you are angry about what someone said on one of your shows, you take them off immediately, just like Fox News did with Tucker Carlson.
Remember that? Fox News settled a lawsuit with Dominion, and suddenly, Carlson was off the air. It seems reasonable to think those two events were related, both because of the timing and the way Carlson was treated. As I reported at the time, there was strong evidence that Carlson was not technically fired, and he didn’t quit, either. According to Megyn Kelly, he was almost certainly still under contract, but they refused to let him go on air—they were willing to waste the millions they were paying Carlson rather than let him say anything else on their airwaves. But CBS is letting Colbert spend about 10 months as sort of a ‘kamikaze broadcaster,’ no longer held back by a fear of being fired or taken off the air. That is not what you do if you are angry at him for what he said, and are afraid he will say some new thing you don’t like in the future.
And, of course, if Colbert’s words were what triggered it, they wouldn’t have canceled the entire show. Unlike most of Fox News’ nightly shows, ‘The Late Show’ wasn’t tied to a specific host. Stephen Colbert isn’t the first host of the show, and they could have transitioned to a different host if they thought the format was still viable.
However, the truth is that the format is not viable. This style of late-night show is declining for many of the same reasons that broadcast TV is dying. These days, people are increasingly choosing to watch what they want, when they want, mostly through streaming. There used to be a thing called ‘appointment television’—that is, shows had fixed times when they would broadcast, and people thought they were so significant that they had to make sure they were home at the right time to watch them. But first with VCRs, later with the rise of DVRs like TiVo (remember that?), and finally with the rise of streaming, many people started to watch what they want, when they want. And the argument for watching these kinds of late-night shows is weak at best.
And not for nothing, but let’s be honest. In the old days, how much of these late-night ratings could be chalked up to their customers just falling asleep in front of the television? That exists, sort of in the age of streaming, but it's just not the same as finishing a night of network TV, falling asleep during the local news, and waking up an hour or two later in the middle of a talk show.
And then there is the sheer economic stupidity of what the ‘big three’ networks are doing right now with that slot. It used to be that NBC had the Tonight Show, ABC had a serious news show called ‘Nightline’ and CBS tried a number of different things, including various talk shows and eventually giving up and airing old movies and the like in that slot—because they figured out that no one could compete in the late-night talk show format with the Tonight Show, especially under Johnny Carson, who was pretty bipartisan in his mockery of political figures.
But now we have three of just about the same show. Furthermore, they all come from basically the same political perspective, with absolutely no effort to balance their humor and tirades so that they might appeal to the right. They are alienating half their potential audience. Thus, we have the ‘big three’ networks fighting over approximately half of a shrinking pie. Meanwhile, Greg Gutfeld, with the radical idea of appealing to half of the country, is eating their lunch — and probably for a lot less money. Put the politics of it aside for a moment—how does this even make sense, economically? Wouldn’t it make sense for at least one of the big three to become more or less politically neutral, thereby attracting a larger audience?
So, I’m not surprised that Colbert’s show is canceled. In fact, given that it is widely reported that the show costs approximately $100 million a year and was losing around $40 million a year, I am more inclined to think it was kept on the air as long as it was due to political considerations.
But I am open to other explanations besides politics for why he remained on the air for so long. For instance, this channel argues with some persuasiveness that part of the value of the talk show format is that it gives publicity to other TV shows …
…so if CBS has a show it wants to push, it sends one of its stars to talk to Stephen Colbert, and both shows benefit from the publicity. The same can be said for Paramount's desire to promote its latest movies. So maybe that is part of the calculus. And maybe some of it was just to deny to ABC and NBC the ratings share that they otherwise would have gotten—and will get once Colbert is gone. That is, perhaps they were willing to lose $40 million a year in order to deny a potential revenue stream to their competitors. But $40 million a year is a lot to lose for those reasons, and it's hard to believe that Colbert’s politics wasn’t a factor.
Back to ‘South Park:’ Truth be told, I didn’t enjoy that episode very much—although there is a plot twist involving Cartman and Butters that made me laugh out loud that I won’t spoil. I think my problem is that the reality they were showing was just too disconnected from the real world. In the real world, no one feels shy about criticizing Trump, and thus, spending a whole episode pretending that he is a threat to free speech just kind of makes my eyes glaze over. The truth is that Trump’s election is the best victory for free speech since the election of 1800.
But I am glad the episode exists because it proves that you can make fun of Trump, even in the most juvenile, insulting, fact-free way possible. I’m sure leftists clapped like seals over it and are declaring that ‘South Park’ is being brave. But as time goes on and nothing happens to ‘South Park,’ Comedy Central, or Paramount over it besides a harshly worded TruthSocial post, it will become clear that no actual bravery was involved.
And that is a good thing. One should never be afraid to criticize others, whether they hold earthly power or hold unearthly power as the founder of a religion. And it is equally good to deflate the left’s narrative that Trump is somehow a danger to the republic.
Now, if only Paramount and Comedy Central had the courage to stand up to Islamofascism...
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