It can be hard, from time to time, to tell if South Park has been building toward anything deliberate with its last two seasons of serialized, unrelenting Trump-blasting. The show has been developing long-term storylines to go with its topics of the week, sure—even if those long-form narratives are centered on ideas as intentionally puerile as a “butt baby” placed in the ass of the devil by Donald Trump himself. But it’s just as often felt like the show is tossing energetic but random swings, trying to simultaneously exorcise the fresh-by-the-week anxieties that come from living in Trumpworld 2.0, while maybe provoking an indignant response from administration figures.
Still, there is a certain method that can potentially be divined from the show’s madness, especially in its most recent bi-weekly installment, “Sora Not Sorry.” Which saw the series arrive at the new extremity of depicting Trump and the show’s pint-sized version of Vice President JD Vance having sex with each other, and then using the reality-fraying nature of AI-generated video to hide the affair. If nothing else, it’s one of the more potent dovetailings the series has done between its “topic of the week” stories—in this case, also a chance to depict Totoro and Bluey as sexual predators, courtesy of AI—and the ongoing Trump jabs, demonstrating the way reality has bent to Trump’s willingness to “fake news!” away inconvenient facts, rather than the other way around.
The question, as always, remains whether the White House will be able to maintain discipline in the face of this latest, and most blatant, of provocations; Trey Parker and Matt Stone have said that their bosses and partners at Paramount have agreed to be hands-off with the Comedy Central series, but it’s hard not to wonder if literally depicting the president and vice president fucking each other on cable TV might not end up drawing, if not the added humiliation of a public response, then at least a pointed phone call to CEO David Ellison. For now, though, the series seems unflagging in its attack instincts, with the only real question at this point being how much further South Park can practically push the envelope at this point.
