The thing about trolling is that it’s a fundamentally self-powering cycle: You piss someone off, they react; you make fun of them for reacting, it pisses them off some more. Its textbook stuff that most of us picked up on the playground (if not the early internet), literally decades ago. But dang if it isn’t still interesting to see the creators of South Park run the playbook so effectively on the United States government.
As we noted earlier this week, series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone doubled down on their efforts to troll Donald Trump and his various accomplices with the second episode of the show’s 27th season, focusing heavily on secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem. As is their style, Parker and Stone went scattershot with their attacks on Noem (and through her, the ICE agents that she’s been aggressively lowering standards to recruit), mixing attacks on her appearance with references to her weirdly proud assertions of dog murder, layered in with jabs at her general attention-seeking behavior in service of making life harder for so many people living in America. In rising to the show’s bait (on a podcast appearance, before wising up for the morning news shows), Noem skipped over all the dog-killing bits and focused on the appearance stuff—admittedly, the easiest material in the episode to dismiss—calling it “petty.” But the thing about trolls is that you really don’t want to challenge them to a petty-off.
Which is to say, online observers have noted that South Park‘s social media team has been happy to take whatever free publicity the White House is willing to serve them, in this case by apparently changing the show’s avatars on all its major social media accounts this week (including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) to Noem’s botox-deprived Salvador-Dali-clock-shop of a face. As with the original jokes, we’d never accuse this of being particularly clever trolling. But it does have the benefit of a certain gleeful relentlessness. (Part of what’s powering South Park right now is the fact that a lot of satirists have punched themselves out on mocking Trump over the last decade—or at least started calling their shots a little more carefully—so this kind of full court press feels bracing.) The question remains, as it has for the last few weeks, how long it will take the White House to actually get its staff firmly enough in line, follow basic internet survival protocol, and stop feeding the trolls. (We have our bets on “never,” given the general mentality of the folks Trump surrounds himself with, but miracles do sometimes occur.)
