Kristi Noem Says Her Melting-Face ‘South Park’ Parody Was ‘Petty’ and ‘Lazy’

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem says that if South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone really wanted to roast her, they should have mocked her job performance instead of her appearance. I guess the part in this week’s episode when Noem threw Dora the Explorer in an ICE van and sex trafficked her to Mar-a-Lago was too subtle for Noem.

On Wednesday, South Park continued its attack on the conservative establishment that currently controls America with the second episode of Season 27, “Got a Nut,” which focused on President Donald “Saddam Hussein” Trump’s push for mass deportation and mass funding to the woefully unqualified forces of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. At the head of ICE’s efforts to kidnap Latino families from live Dora the Explorer concerts was Noem, with her puppy-killing pistol and her team of plastic surgeons at the ready in case of emergency. In an episode filled with solid roasts and political parodies, Noem’s portrayal as a face-melting, dog-murdering racist stood out as the Best in Show, but Noem has a bone to pick with the South Park team that continues to hound her with insults.

While the rest of the Right has reversed course on Trump’s strategy to call South Park irrelevant and unpopular when faced with its mockery, Noem apparently didn’t get the memo that urged the Department of Homeland Security’s social media team to lean into the joke. Yesterday evening, Noem spoke to CNN to complain about South Park’s attacks on her appearance, calling the show “lazy” for making such superficial jokes about her cosmetic surgeries.

“If they wanted to criticize my job, go ahead and do that, but clearly they can’t, they just pick something petty like that,” said Noem, who apparently interpreted South Park’s accusation that she would deport Mexican souls from heaven as a positive performance review.

Despite her strong words of criticism, Noem admitted that she did not actually watch “Got a Nut” because she was too busy “going over budget numbers and stuff,” but given the Trump administration’s tenuous relationship with the truth, it’s just as likely that Noem couldn’t watch South Park on Wednesday night because her eyes made a mad dash for freedom along with the rest of her face.

“It never ends, but it’s so lazy to constantly make fun of women for how they look,” Noem complained about the attacks from South Park, which, in the same episode, used the fat-faced JD Vance meme to turn the Vice President into Trump’s tiny, couch-humping henchman. Then, Noem made an even more hilarious claim about Parker and Stone’s famously nonpartisan political leanings, “It’s always the liberals and the extremists who do that.”

While the running gag in which Noem’s severely altered face would slide off of her skull and attempt to escape the DHS Secretary throughout “Got a Nut” was certainly one of the most hilarious and memorable roasts in recent South Park history, it was only one of three such angles that South Park took in their takedown of Noem. Equally iconic to the face-melting bit was how South Park had the self-admitted puppy-slayer brutally murder four more dogs (including Krypto the Superdog), and the aforementioned ICE raids of decidedly gang-free groups of brown people that couldn’t have been more relevant to Noem's job performance.

If Noem actually watched the South Park episode instead of forming surface-level opinions about “Got a Nut” based on the appearance of a few screenshots, she would understand that Parker and Stone were ruthlessly clear in their criticisms of her actions as DHS head — but it’s not like they’re going to back off from hitting their superficial target where it hurts, either.

Shortly after Noem complained to Trump’s nemeses at CNN about South Park bullying her, the official South Park Twitter account changed its profile picture to this: