Why South Park Creators Were Drawn to Trump’s Chaos Like Flies to Honey

Politics wasn’t meant to be the focus of the final seasons of “South Park,” but President Donald Trump’s seemingly limitless influence in the United States made it impossible to avoid.

“It’s pop culture. It’s not that we all became political. It’s that politics became pop culture,” creator Trey Parker told the New York Times in an interview with co-creator Matt Stone published Saturday.

Although Stone and Parker deliberately delayed the show’s 27th season to avoid the disaster that was the 2024 election, “South Park” couldn’t resist talking about the MAGA macrocosm when it returned this summer after a two-year hiatus.

On the one hand, the chronically subversive creators said the “new taboos” around speaking ill of Trump had them “drawn to it like flies to honey.”

south park/paramount

But behind the scenes, the president’s influence also emerged when Parker and Stone were locked in negotiations with Paramount at the same time that the entertainment giant’s proposed merger with Skydance made it essential that they remain in White House favor.

It was at that point that they decided to focus their first episode on Trump would be a way to “show our independence in some way,” according to Stone.

Just hours after Stone and Parker signed a five-year, $1.25 billion deal with Paramount, “South Park” returned with an episode that poked fun at the shift from President Joe Biden-era identity politics to life in Trump’s America.

“We’re just very middle-of-the-road guys,” Parker said of his political outlook. “We make fun of any extremist of any kind. We did that for years with the woke thing. That was very funny to us. And this is very funny to us.”

south park/paramount

As the early months of Trump 2.0 offered no shortage of horrors and absurdities, “South Park” had plenty of material, anchoring the plot of seasons 27 and 28 in the president’s relationship with a muscular but sensitive Satan, who is pregnant with his child.

Tackling all things Trump has been a boon for “South Park” ratings, with viewership doubling from its 2023 numbers, according to Nielsen.

Although White House representatives called Trump’s turn on the show a “desperate attempt to get attention,” the creators said “South Park” doesn’t need chaos in the capital to remain relevant.

Telling the Times that they will drop the MAGA-verse once they are “sick of it,” Parker said, “If there’s one thing we know, it’s that our show is going to be a lot longer than theirs. So we just have to do this for now.”

The duo previously acknowledged the creative dangers of tackling politics while discussing why they moved away from Trump plots in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in the wake of the 2016 presidential election.

“Dude, we’re turning into CNN now. We’re turning into, ‘Tune in to see what we’re going to say about Trump,'” Stone said he remembered thinking. “Matt and I hate it, but somehow we got caught up in it.”

For the 2024 election, Parker told Vanity Fair that he thought they had squeezed all the comedic material they could out of then-candidate Trump.

“I don’t know what else we could say about Trump,” he explained.