The Trump administration can’t win its flame war with ‘South Park’

“I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump,” South Park co-creator Trey Parker told Vanity Fair last September. Then Trump won the 2024 election.

After witnessing the chaotic first six months of the president’s second term, the razor-tongued, foul-mouthed satirists behind South Park have understandably found more to say. The July 23 premiere of Season 27 skewered Trump’s extractive legal battles with the media and other institutions, his long entanglement in the Jeffrey Epstein saga, and, well, his manhood. The Department of Homeland Security has since tried to reclaim the narrative, using South Park for its own ends by putting an image from the show into a try-hard tweet. But this is one battle the U.S. government has no chance of winning.

The day before its most recent episode aired, the show’s X account tweeted a pair of images, debuting a South Park-ian version of real DHS Secretary/influencer Kristi Noem and depicting South Park Elementary guidance counselor Mr. Mackey as a new member of ICE. Within hours, the DHS account reacted, repurposing an image of masked ICE officers from the teaser and adding a link to ICE’s recruitment site. (The episode comes amid a major recruitment push; on August 6, Noem announced the removal of ICE’s current 21-and-up age limit for new recruits, perhaps hoping to capitalize on all the fresh attention.)

The goofily menacing use of South Park animation in a tweet is perfectly in keeping with DHS’s social media in 2025. Americans generally tend not to look to the government for daily doses of humor, but try telling that to the second Trump administration.

Since January’s inauguration, the official White House X account has posted images of Trump as a king, pope, and Star Wars sith, while the DHS account has posted edgelord tweets including Studio Ghibli-style AI images of immigrants being taken into custody in tears, not to mention AI crocodiles wearing ICE hats to inaugurate the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center. These accounts conjure a queasy alchemy of the visual vocabulary of memes—only wielded with the sneering smugness of total authority toward people who have no power to fight back.

Now, however, they’ve squared up against people who do have that power.

Trying to get in on the joke

Not long after DHS tweeted a South Park-branded recruitment ad for ICE, the show clapped back. Its X account quote-tweeted DHS’s post, adding: “Wait, so we ARE relevant?”—a reference to the White House statement about South Park’s season premiere, which claimed the show has not been relevant for over 20 years—and adding, for good measure, a hashtag encouraging DHS to eat a bag of, well, manhood.

That tweet is just the beginning, too. Unlike the various social media managers embedded in this administration, the South Park creators have at their disposal more humorous weapons for a flame war than a basic command of memes and an absence of empathy.

Beyond their ICE-mocking August 6 episode, subsequent outings could remain laser-focused on the topic and, of course, on Trump, if Parker and co-creator Matt Stone feel suitably inclined. As the 2012 documentary 6 Days to Air divulged—within its very title—South Park episodes can go from conception to execution in less than a week, and they can include new material practically right up until airtime. This show is nimble, adaptable—and savage.

These are not people this administration wants for foes. As evidenced by Trump gushing over Sydney Sweeney’s membership in the GOP this week, as well as the Department of Defense referencing Sweeney’s much-discussed American Eagle ad in a tweet about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, this administration is desperate for MAGA to become as culturally relevant as it is politically powerful. 

South Park’s equal-opportunity satire

Part of what South Park made fun of in the premiere, in fact, was Trump seeking to exert his will over popular culture through political pressure, nodding toward The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’s cancellation and the defunding of NPR. But the younger pop-culture junkies Trump hopes to bring or keep in the tent—the Joe Rogan contingent, for instance—tend to be the very audience South Park most reliably attracts (men under age 35).

Even in its 27th season, the show still carries weight with young people who consider themselves politically unaffiliated. Its unapologetic, equal-opportunity satire has never been “woke,” per se, nor specifically anti-woke, even as it has chafed, at great length, over the strictures of political correctness.

Like its fellow multigeneration-spanning vehicle for satire, Saturday Night Live, South Park punches up at whichever party is in power. Its approach to politics is perhaps best summarized in an infamous 2004 episode that depicted the election between John Kerry and George W. Bush as one between a literal “giant douche” and a “turd sandwich.” 

South Park has no sacred cows, and having just signed a $1.5 billion streaming deal with Paramount, its creators have nothing to lose.

Why MAGA won’t win this meme war

As with all the administration’s memes, the unsuccessful South Park rebuttals can’t cover up the MAGA movement’s overall feelings of aggrievement—its festering sense that no matter how much power it amasses or how many people it gleefully deports, broader cultural cachet remains unattainable.

Flailing to contort the show’s barbs into content only gives South Park more power. Though Parker and Stone lamented last year that there was nothing left to say about Trump, taking the administration to task has already elevated South Park to its highest ratings—and yes, relevance—in years.

On top of everything else, this is all unfolding right as Joe Rogan and his ilk grow increasingly disillusioned with Trump over both his Epstein entanglements and the ICE raids, creating a perfect storm of bad buzz that this administration can’t meme away.

Sure enough, the episode about ICE ended up about as brutal as the DHS social media manager may have feared. After months of citizen outrage over masked ICE officers raiding spaces as innocuous as an elementary school graduation, with many comparing it to the “secret police” of authoritarian countries, the show parodied the agency’s overzealous, blundering tactics—with a violent raid on a Dora the Explorer theatrical performance.

In one especially incisive jab, the episode depicts the hypocrisy of ICE officers’ need for anonymity. “I’m proud to work for the I-C-E,” one masked agent says in a recruitment video, pulling the mask higher on his face.

The only response to the episode as of Thursday afternoon was from notoriously thin-skinned Vice President JD Vance, who was doing his best to appear unbothered by his debut on the show as a photoshopped, stout minion to Trump. Perhaps DHS and the White House have learned their lesson, or maybe their social teams are currently formulating what they consider the perfect response.

Either way, many of the young people they’re hoping to reach are likely far more interested in what South Park has to say about the government than vice versa.