South Park prods at tariffs and Fox News, but keeps its eye on the "pissing off Trump" prize

The overt topic of “Wok Is Dead” might have been the tariffs, for instance, which massively increase the price of Pop Mart’s imported plush toys even as mania for them sweeps South Park Elementary. But the show was just as focused, if not more so, on underscoring the endlessly permissive morality of Fox News and its viewers when it comes to Trump’s behavior. And most especially on poking the man itself, as faux Fox correspondents repeat the “fucking Satan” phrase multiple times, fawning over Trump for having landed the devil himself. (There was also some material with Jesus investigating the demonic Labubus, because you have to fit some plot into the thing somewhere, but as with a lot of South Park‘s output this season, the focus was clearly on provocation and jokes first.) The whole thing built—after in-depth discussions of what Trump fucking Satan might look and work like—to the reveal that the sitting president has, indeed, impregnated Old Scratch, and that Fox News thinks this is just marvelous.

If nothing else, the one-week-on, one-week-off structure of the season—besides doing its basic job of prolonging the news cycle around the series—is clearly giving Parker and Stone room to find new ways to thumb their eye at the White House. As we’ve noted before, none of the really grabbing material at play here is subtle, because “subtle” is not currently in South Park‘s own best interest. The show has taken firm grip of the idea that it’s the one media project in all of America lobbing these kind of deliberately puerile, wildly popular spitballs at Trump on a national level, and it’s clearly ready to ride that impulse through six more lightly serialized episodes, figuring out what the worst thing it can show the man saying and doing on cable TV every two weeks might be.