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Like it or not, South Park has taken on a weirdly heavy role in our culture at the moment, one in which the actual residents of the actual White House both attack, and try to co-opt, the show’s messaging, massively elevating the series’ profile, and its function as a cultural barometer. Said meter, meanwhile, continues to point straight at a full-on war with not just Donald Trump, but his whole administration, as the show continues to basically dare Trump and his associates to make it important. “Got A Nut,” the second episode of the show’s 27th season, doubled down on that scorched earth approach tonight, building on the swings taken by the show’s micropenis-festooned season premiere. That included aggressive attacks on ICE, Charlie Kirk, and most especially Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, depicted as merciless attention seeker whose obsessive desire to shoot dogs didn’t stop with the one she actually copped to killing in her 2024 autobiography.
South Park‘s decision to stop fucking around with surrogate characters like Mr. Garrison and just say “Kristi Noem loves shooting dogs, up to and including Krypto from Superman” reveals a show all-but-begging for another confrontation with Trump and his associates—see also JD Vance being depicted as the sexually servile Tattoo to Trump’s Mr. Roarke, because there’s nothing 16-year-old South Park fans love like a good Fantasy Island reference. As ever, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone seem content to swing haphazardly between puerile jokes about “masterdebaters” and Noem’s face falling apart with more pointed material about how so many of the people propping up the current administration are just looking to “make their nut,” whether it’s by stoking online anger, or helping ICE literally invade heaven to deport brown people. It’s classic troll tactics: Throw everything you can at the target, because something is going to get the blood pressure to rise.
South Park has always occupied what feels like an outsized role in American culture: It makes more money, and garners more attention, than any number of shows that might approach cultural material in less bombastic or more thoughtful fashion, simply by dint of being willing to take the biggest, loudest swings. It’s an approach that pays off best when reality feels at its dumbest, and now that the show’s fully committed to focusing its ire on Trump, the question simply becomes whether the White House will continue to play along—or if the Very Normal Personalities currently occupying it will be able to resist letting themselves be trolled.
