Two weeks ago, South Park kicked off its 27th season with one of its angriest, most politically daring episodes. The animated sitcom, long a magnet for controversy, incurred the wrath of the current US administration for its brutal and graphic send-up of Donald Trump as a petty, micro-penised dictator, as well as parent company Paramount’s cowardly capitulations to him.
Creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker received immediate backlash not only from online conservative fans (who make up a good portion of their audience) but the White House itself, which released a statement calling South Park hypocritical and irrelevant. That latter charge was especially poignant, given that Stone and Parker just inked a new deal with Paramount for five more seasons, plus streaming rights, to the tune of $1.5bn.
Tensions have only risen in the two weeks since the premiere aired. During that time, the show released several stills from the follow-up episode, which widens its sights from Trump to his media mouthpieces and foot soldiers. Figures from both groups – rightwing activist Charlie Kirk and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – boastfully shared these images on X, with the latter sarcastically thanking South Park for helping them in their recruiting efforts. (The show responded on X by asking DHS “Wait, so we ARE relevant? #eatabagofdicks”.)
All of this is to say that the new episode, titled Got a Nut, is coming in hot. And for the most part, it lives up to the hype.
The episode follows two different stories: in one, the show’s resident bigot, Eric Cartman, is outraged to learn that fellow fourth grader Clyde has risen to prominence as a white nationalist podcaster who makes offensive claims about women, Jewish people, Black people and other minority groups to goad them into debating him in exploitative viral videos (“WOKE STUDENT TOTALLY PWNED”). Of course, Cartman isn’t angry on behalf of any of those groups; he’s mad that Clyde is ripping off his gimmick and reaping all the rewards. He decides to muscle in on the act, styling his hair after Kirk’s signature coif (“the stupidest haircut I’ve ever seen,” says one character), trolling college girls on social media and proclaiming himself a “master-debater”.
The other storyline sees South Park Elementary’s kindly counsellor Mr Mackey out of a job thanks to government budget cuts. Desperate to find a new way to “make his nut”, he reluctantly joins Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Alongside his fellow masked goons – a collection of inexperienced, illiterate miscreants – and under the leadership of DHS secretary Kristi Noem, Mackey ends up taking part in violent raids at Dora the Explorer concerts and the literal gates of heaven, where he helps round up every Hispanic in sight (per Noem: “Only detain the brown ones! If it’s brown, it goes down!”).
Both stories eventually intersect, as Clyde and Mackey are rewarded for their work with a trip to Mar-a-Lago. The country club is depicted as a gross, white trash version of bizarre 70s/80s US wish fulfilment drama Fantasy Island, with President Trump and vice-president JD Vance standing in for Ricardo Montalban and dwarf actor Herve Villechaize’s characters. Younger viewers may not get this reference, but they don’t need to: the visual of an ice-cream-suited Trump kicking around a dwarf version of Vance (his already big face puffed up to resemble the popular meme of him) is hilarious all on its own.
Trump gets off easy here compared with Vance, but the show saves its harshest vitriol for Noem, who spends all her time viciously gunning down cute puppies (including the beloved Krypto from the new Superman movie) and struggling to keep her overly Botoxed face from melting off her skull. It’s a ruthless scouring of Noem, and you can feel Stone and Parker’s disdain for her in every frame.
As per South Park tradition, the central characters come to realise the errors of their ways, with Mr Mackey delivering the episode’s moral straight down the lens: “If you’re doing something you don’t really believe in just to make your nut, you’re gonna find that you just get sadder and your nut just gets bigger, m’kay?”
Herein lies the issue with the episode. Got a Nut posits that the individuals who serve as Trump’s most gung-ho operatives are acting entirely cynically, doing and saying things they know are wrong for an easy pay cheque. Certainly, that’s part of it (see the signing bonuses and sponsorship deals the episode highlights), but it is dangerous to underestimate how many of these people fully believe their own rhetoric.
But of course, it would be silly to expect a half-hour episode of South Park to encapsulate every facet of Trump’s dystopia. Luckily, we’ve got plenty of episodes left to look forward to (48, minimum). Just as exciting will be the surefire backlash coming from Trump and his base, who are utterly incapable of not taking the bait.
