No Comedy Show Has Explained How Tariffs Work Better Than ‘South Park’

In last night’s new episode of South Park, “Wok is Dead,” Trey Parker and Matt Stone explained President Donald “Saddam Hussein” Trump’s tariff plan with elegant simplicity: “It’s like AIDS!”

One of President Trump’s first moves upon his return to the White House earlier this year was to roll out a restrictive, seemingly arbitrary tariff policy that “punished” our closest trading partners by imposing heavy taxes on imported goods that get passed along to the American consumer. Since the new tariff-based trading policy began, Americans have had to pay increasingly exorbitant prices for everything from coffee to clothing to collectible demonic kids’ toys like the Labubu, the Hong Kong-based stuffed animal that sent the girls of South Park Elementary into violent hysteria earlier tonight.

A central plot line in “Wok is Dead” revolved around Butters trying to obtain an ultra-rare Labubu for his “girlfriend” Red, only to find that City Asian Pop-Up Store (formerly City Wok) has taken every last cent of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods out of its customers’ pockets, because, as Tuong Lu Kim so eloquently explained, “I don’t get fucked by tariffs, you get fucked by tariffs! In China, we call that ‘hot potato.’”

The problem with tariffs, as everyone who doesn’t love how Donald Trump is fucking Satan now hopefully understands, is that, while Trump may claim that the high taxes paid on goods from China give Americans a leg up over Chinese competitors, any company that has to import goods or materials before selling them on the American market is simply going to raise their prices by however much Trump’s tariffs are that week. In fact, they might just use Trump’s tariffs as an excuse to raise prices even further and squeeze consumers for every last dime.

So, really, Trump isn’t punishing China with the tariffs — he’s punishing every single American who buys goods sourced from China, which, as we all know, is every single American. And, since Trump continues to change the tariffs on a whim despite what any court rules, that means that Americans have no way of knowing how bad they’re about to get price-gouged until they’re at the check-out counter. Or, as Kim put it, “You never know with tariffs, they make no sense!”

But, while Trump’s tariffs may put even greater pressure on the budgets of average Americans who were already struggling to get by before Trump started his one-sided trade war, maybe it’s for the best if Labubus end up becoming prohibitively expensive for the average schoolchild. The demonic ritual that the South Park Elementary fourth-graders performed with Butters’ super-rare Labubu just ended up summoning Trump, and history has taught us to keep that guy far away from any underaged girls.