South Park has lashed Trump again. So why are MAGA supporters trying to get in on the joke?

South Park has continued its satirical hammering of the Trump administration in its latest episode, taking aim at ICE, right-wing podcasters and introducing a version of Vice President JD Vance – but this time the administration and its supporters are trying to get in on the joke.

The second instalment of the 27th season of the animated series dropped on Thursday, two weeks after the first episode showed President Donald Trump in bed with Satan, depicted him nude and making fun of the size of his genitalia and also featuring Trump suing the town of South Park itself.

That episode attracted the ire of Trump’s MAGA supporters and earned a rebuke from the White House. “This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “President Trump has delivered on more promises in just six months than any other president in our country’s history – and no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak.”

What happened that week

The first episode of South Park’s 27th season was released just hours after Paramount’s $US8 billion merger with Skydance was approved by the US Federal Communications Commission.

It also came a week after The Late Show With Stephen Colbert was cancelled, just days after that host had taken aim at Paramount’s $US16 million settlement with Trump over his lawsuit against 60 Minutes, which was broadcast on the company’s CBS network.

Trump had sued the program over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview in the lead-up to last year’s US presidential election.

Speculation was rife that Colbert’s sacking and the settlement with Trump were an effort by Paramount to remove any potential blocks to the approval of the sale to Skydance – and South Park also referenced those incidents in the show.

However, Paramount said the decision to end Colbert’s show was financial, and reports later claimed the show cost the network between $US40 million and $US50 million ($61 million to $76 million) a year.

At the same time, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone reached a $US1.5 billion, five-year streaming deal with Paramount in which they also agreed to produce 10 episodes a year.

Days later the first post-deal episode emerged, going on to dominate the news cycle, pleasing Trump critics and enraging his supporters and surprising the creators. “Even just three days ago, we were like, ‘I don’t know if people are going to like this,’” Parker said at Comic-Con after the first episode’s release.

Despite the backlash, the show has clearly doubled down on its criticism of the administration and the broader ecosystem around it – even as those in the satirical firing line try to claim the joke as their own.

The new episode

At the core of the new episode is school counsellor Mr Mackey’s new job with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), after he is sacked from his job in favour of Jesus (another long-running character in the show).

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem features heavily in the episode, shooting a dog within moments of her on-screen arrival (Noem admitted to killing her 14-month-old dog, Cricket, claiming it had an “aggressive personality” and wasn’t particularly good at chasing down pheasants in her memoir No Going Back).

The Noem character also leads various ICE raids, including one on a Dora The Explorer concert and another in heaven, while delivering the character’s slogan: “If it’s brown, it goes down”.

Mackey, naturally, turns out to be an effective ICE agent, setting the story up for its big finale at Mar-a-Lago. There he is welcomed by Trump and Vance, depicted in a kind of Fantasy Island motif, with Trump as Mr Roarke and Vance as the diminutive Tattoo.

In an even wilder twist, earlier this week the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of ICE agents from the show, with a link to a recruitment site.

Meanwhile, a subplot of the episode has Eric Cartman setting up a rival right-wing podcast after his fellow fourth grader Clyde’s podcast has huge success.

Cartman is incensed by the way Clyde has leveraged the bigotry Cartman assumed was his own (taking aim at woke students, women’s rights, Black people, Jewish people and others), and is determined to do a bigger and better right-wing podcast, soon calling himself a “master debater”, a gag as silly as it seems.

The show uses the arc to target right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk, with Cartman’s usual beanie gone and his hair styled like Kirk, who has now changed his X profile photo to the image of Cartman in podcaster mode.

Towards the end of the episode, Cartman and Clyde head to The Charlie Kirk Award for Young Master Debaters. Again, Kirk appears to have taken the jibes well, posting a clip of that scene on his X feed. Kirk also suggested that some of Cartman’s rants are taken straight from his show.

Why are MAGA supporters embracing the episode?

Melbourne University Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences Lauren Rosewarne says the efforts to co-opt the satire are an attempt to get in on the joke and frame it for MAGA supporters.

Unlike The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Rosewarne says, South Park has always had a large conservative audience, making the attempt worthwhile.

“Outsiders might think that is lame, but for insiders it’s a way to express bravado in the face of a pop culture attack … for the past six months, you’ve seen a turn where MAGA thinks of themselves as the mainstream and this [South Park] is a reminder that no, you are not,” Rosewarne says.

“They feel they have a lot of cultural capital, more than the first administration... this is about them talking to their own people and reframing it: ‘We are not the victims, we are in on it’. They would not do the same to Colbert.”

South Park is now streaming on Paramount+.

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