Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Anti-Trump Stance Is Nothing New

Warning: This article contains details of sexual assault.

Wreaking havoc with any “Best Characters on South Park” lists that don’t include Trump’s talking micro-dick, the recent season premiere of South Park famously shit all over the sitting president. And not the fun kind of shit that brings presents and sings Christmas carols. 

Wednesday’s episode “Sermon on the ‘Mount” immediately sparked a backlash amongst right-leaning ex-fans, and even prompted a comment from Trump himself some assistant press secretary named Taylor Rogers. She claimed that South Park “hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years” and is “hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.”

A lot of Trump supporters have claimed that they were once fans of South Park, and even “loved” it, but not now that the show has so clearly changed. The new, Trump-bashing South Park will no doubt alienate their core audience going forward, right?

While there’s no doubt that the show has changed its mind about certain issues over the years, such as in the case of Manbearpig, when it comes to Donald Trump, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been pretty consistent about letting us all know how much they hate him.

And this has been going on for at least a decade. Back in 2015, when Trump was the GOP primary frontrunner, Season 19’s “Where My Country Gone?” found Mr. Garrison journeying to Canada. America’s northern neighbor is now a deserted hellscape thanks to the current Prime Minister/President: an unsubtle Trump caricature, who built a border wall to keep Americans out.

Speaking of a lack of subtlety, Garrison, who’s fed up with Canadian immigrants, then sexually assaults and murders Canadian President Trump. 

And it’s not like this grotesque twist went unnoticed by the general public at the time. It similarly made headlines, with some suggesting that the show had finally gone “too far.” 

Aside from the wildly distasteful scene, the episode had a larger point to make about Trump’s anti-immigrant scapegoating. As Garrison announces his candidacy for president, Kyle points out that electing an authoritarian dictator isn’t the solution to a problem that was caused by authoritarianism. “If there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that we have to stop this kind of sensationalistic politics before the same thing happens to us,” Kyle pleads. 

Unfortunately, the town doesn't agree. 

Then there was President Garrison, who wasn’t exactly the most flattering Trump analogue.

When Trump was elected in 2016, Parker and Stone had to radically alter the episode they’d prepared about Bill Clinton becoming the First Gentleman. They were seemingly so dispirited by the election results, the duo even considered airing a black screen on Comedy Central in lieu of an episode. “Everyone was so shell-shocked, and it was like you didn’t want to see that the world had changed,” Parker recalled in 2017. “You wanted to be like, ‘Okay, this horrible thing has happened, and (Trump) has been elected president, (but) South Park’s still on the air. The sun’s still rising. Water’s still clear.”

They began to pay less attention to Trump, not because they didn’t hate him, but because he was already a walking self-parody. “If you have like a little monkey and it’s running himself into the wall over and over and you’re like, ‘That’s funny, but how am I gonna make fun of the monkey running himself into the wall?’” Parker explained. “I can discuss the monkey running himself into the wall, I can copy the monkey running into the wall, but nothing’s funnier than the monkey just running himself into the wall.”

As a result, the show’s virulent anti-Trump sentiment has seemingly been memory-holed by a lot of people on the right, including Donald Trump Jr., who proudly proclaimed that “South Park doesn’t miss” in 2023. 

Which sure is a weird thing to say about a show in which one of the characters gleefully abused your dad.