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This week, South Park aired its second episode of the second Trump presidency, largely taking aim at secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem. Throughout the episode, the Noem character shoots every dog she comes across, sex trafficks Dora The Explorer, raids “brown people” from heaven, and is constantly getting re-made-up and getting botox shots as her face melts and at one point tries to flee from her. It’s this last element that Noem has specifically condemned.
Calling into Glenn Beck’s radio show on Thursday (via The Daily Beast), Noem says that she “didn’t get to see” the episode because she “was going over budget numbers and stuff.” Noem continues, “It never ends, but it’s so lazy to constantly make fun of women for how they look. It’s always the liberals and the extremists who do that. If they wanted to criticize my job, go ahead and do that, but clearly they can’t, they just pick something petty like that.” In fairness, Noem says she didn’t see the episode, and it inarguably does make fun of her appearance. But it also absolutely criticizes her job, and homeland security at large.
Anyone who wasn’t born yesterday may recall a similar maneuver from the first Trump administration, when Michelle Wolf made jokes about Sarah Huckabee Sanders being a liar, and Sanders responding by criticizing the jokes about her appearance to attempt to shift the conversation away from the substantive critiques. But South Park is not Michelle Wolf and is content to just plainly make fun of a woman’s appearance. The show has since updated its X profile picture to depict the Noem character’s face melting as it does in the episode. We’ll see how this beef progresses during the eight remaining episodes in this season of South Park.
