Conservative ‘South Park’ Fans Demand That the Show Stop Mocking Trump and Go After Joe Biden

South Park Season 27 has seriously triggered Donald “Saddam Hussein” Trump and his followers, many of whom are having such a hard time remembering who is currently President that they should probably delete their tweets gloating about how Joe Biden is senile.

Starting in the early seasons of the show, the unofficial philosophy of South Park had long been to treat everyone with strong political convictions with an equal level of ridicule and contempt. Best exemplified in the 2004 pre-election episode “Douche and Turd,” the old South Park typically took a smarmy, centrist, “both sides are equally stupid” approach to partisan politics – but that was before President Garrison completely destroyed the balance of political stupidity. Now, with South Park Season 27 earning official condemnations from the White House and the entire right-wing propaganda machine in full-on cope mode after each new episode, South Park is out for blood as it parodies a President who is literally fucking Satan.

After last night’s new South Park episode, “Wok is Dead,” launched one of the most damning attacks on Trump in South Park history, right-wingers on Twitter came to the President’s defense and demanded to know why South Park didn’t hit Joe Biden nearly as hard in the 12 episodes they released during his administration:

The first and most obvious answer to the Right's question of why South Park is fixated on Trump and won't attack Joe and Hunter Biden in Season 27 is that, right now, Trump is President, and Biden is not. But the issue still remains over why South Park declined to attack Biden with this fervor during his time in the White House, and there are multiple possible reasons behind that move, the first of which is that, due to the whole global pandemic, the multiple writers' strikes and the high-profile lawsuit between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, during Biden's presidency, there just wasn't that much South Park to go around back then.

Under Biden's watch, South Park only released two seasons at six episodes apiece and eight total streaming specials, and, with so many topical issues to address, all Biden got in the way of mockery was a background appearance as a whiteboard doodle with devil horns in South ParQ Vaccination Special. Which, to be fair, is the least amount of presence a sitting President has ever had over the course of South Park history – but, when you crunch the numbers, one background gag in twenty possible episodes isn't actually that much of a statistical anomaly.

During George W. Bush's two terms, the last Republican President before Saddam only played a speaking role in six South Park episodes (or seven if you separate the two parts of “Cartoon Wars”) out of 116 total South Park episodes in eight seasons. Historically, the President doesn't really play that big a part in the show, and South Park can and does go entire seasons without an appearance from the Commander in Chief, regardless of his political party. Plus, and most importantly out of all the reasons for why Biden wasn't a constant South Park punching bag, making the President a main character on South Park is a very dangerous game.

Back in Season 19, Parker and Stone decided to cast Mr. Garrison as their stand-in for future President Trump, who, early in his first Presidential campaign as a Republican, was a fringe candidate and a media side-show that few people took seriously. However, as the Trump campaign continued to pick up steam, Mr. Garrison's role on South Park grew at a similarly concerning rate, and, by the time Trump won the nomination, Garrison was practically the main character of the show. We don't need to remind South Park fans what happened next – when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential Election, Parker and Stone had to frantically re-write their post-election episode, and the reality of the next four years of South Park began to set in for them and their fans. 

The President Garrison seasons were the most overtly political in South Park history, and they exhausted fans and writers alike as the show simply ran out of ways to make Trump funny with Mr. Garrison playing the part. As such, when Trump's first term mercifully came to an end, South Park used the infrequent release schedule of its Biden years as an excuse to take a long hiatus from Presidential humor, and they even deliberately skipped the 2024 election cycle in order to avoid getting sucked back into a shitty, multi-season arc.

Now, South Park is, once again, featuring the President as a main character in Season 27, and it's fair to ask why Parker and Stone have decided to change course so dramatically. Ultimately, that's a question that only they can answer – but, if I can venture a guess, I would say that, now that the South Park creators are fathers in their mid-50s, Parker and Stone are taking their place in the world more seriously than they did when they were acid-tripping iconoclasts in their late 20s, and they worry about the future of the country where their children and grandchildren will suffer the consequences of mistakes made today.

Maybe – and this might be a hard one to stomach for right-wing South Park fans – Trump in 2025 simply isn't a normal president, and it doesn't make creative sense to parody him as if he was just a senile, ineffectual figurehead like Biden. Maybe things are truly worse in American politics now than they were when our choices were a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich. Maybe Trump really is fucking Satan.