South Park releases brutally hilarious new PSA 'thanking' Trump for suing their network

Since 1997, South Park has long considered itself an equal opportunity comedy show that isn’t afraid to unsheathe crass, irreverent humor at whomever or whatever is in power or in the news. However, even with that longstanding reputation, people were shocked at seeing their Season 27 premiere episode featuring an AI-generated mock PSA of Donald Trump walking naked in the desert.

This comedy bit refers to recent news of Paramount, the company that owns Comedy Central which airs South Park, settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump, who sued the company over the editing choices made of a 60 Minutes interview with Trump’s 2024 Presidential election opponent, Kamala Harris. Trump claims part of the multi-million dollar settlement includes millions of dollars worth of advertising and public service announcements on Paramount programming, which Paramount denies. In any case, that didn’t stop South Park from prodding at this notion.

Disclaimer: The embedded video is NSFW with sections generated with A.I.

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One of the main storylines of the episode featured President Trump suing the town of South Park with the citizens agreeing to pay for a PSA. The A.I.-generated PSA showed an image of Donald Trump walking in the desert, stripping off his clothes, and falling to the ground, all while a narrator praises him. The PSA crescendos with Trump’s comically small penis saying, “I’m Donald J. Trump and I endorse this message” and ends with a URL spoof of the Christian “He Gets Us” campaign.

This isn’t the first time South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone dabbled with A.I.-generated content. Along with comedian Peter Serafinowicz, they created a comedy web series called Sassy Justice during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that primarily used A.I. deepfake technology. Serafinowicz did a number of impressions for the show, including one of “sassy” Donald Trump.

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The South Park season premiere also featured the President sleeping with Satan and drawing comparisons to another target/character Saddam Hussein while also discussing the Jeffrey Epstein files. The episode also referred to the Trump Administration cutting federal funding for NPR and the controversy surrounding the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS, another network owned by Paramount. While Paramount stated that Colbert’s show was canceled for “financial reasons,” the announcement came shortly after Colbert skewered Trump in a monologue on the show and Trump publicly praising the cancellation on social media which caused skepticism. It’s important to note that the episode aired mere days after Parker and Stone reached a $1.5 billion streaming deal with Paramount after months of tension given Parker and Stone’s frustration with the pending Paramount and Skydance merger.

While there is criticism that the show has “gone woke,” South Park has attacked politics and political figures throughout its run. While this episode specifically targeted Trump, it has also mocked liberal figureheads like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama among others. They even have a recurring character named P.C. Principal that makes fun of aggressively left politically correct culture. There is even a Wikipedia entry for the term “South Park Republican.” Regarding Trump specifically, in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2024, Parker and Stone stated that they had little interest in satirizing him at all in the show anymore.

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But they apparently decided to satirize Trump because he’s the person in power again, not to champion left wing or right wing talking points. Same they did with powerful people in the past, whether they were politicians like Al Gore, celebrities like Bono, corporations like Disney, movements like Scientology, or anything else that has significantly more money, influence, and power than the average person. Satire comedy, by its nature, does it best when it “punches up” and there is no one more “up” than the current President of the United States. Given how Trump has been suing or withholding funding for media outlets that he doesn’t care for and interpreting it as a method to restrict speech, the President has made himself a prime target for Parker and Stone's type of humor. While the content itself is meant to shock, it’s no surprise that the show would spoof the media corporations bowing to Trump’s power and pressure while also outright mocking the President’s actions, speech, and appearance (A.I. generated or not).