How ‘South Park’ could help Democrats win back the young voters the party lost to Trump

The Season 27 premiere of “South Park” in July 2025 began like so many of the show’s episodes: Resident bigot Eric Cartman is pissed off. He directs his ire at the Trump administration, which had recently pulled federal funding for NPR, because he enjoyed hearing liberals “whine about stuff.” In other words, Cartman is irate that Trump has stolen his hateful, vindictive shtick.

As the episode goes on, other South Park residents join Cartman in rallying against Donald Trump. In the show’s infamously over-the-top style, the president is depicted as thin-skinned, deceitful – and, well, sexually ill-equipped. The episode ends with a surreal, graphic deepfake scene of a totally nude Donald Trump stumbling around a desert.

The White House immediately blasted “South Park” as irrelevant and “desperate for attention.”

The ratings tell a different story. The season premiere scored 6 million viewers across Comedy Central and Paramount+, with even more tuning in two weeks later for the follow-up. Each ensuing episode has further skewered Trump and his administration.

“South Park” has long targeted ineffectual authority figures with ripped-from-the-headlines timeliness, which is made possible by its weekly production schedule. Whereas most animated television shows require months of production lead time, series co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone need just a week or two to write, voice and animate an entire episode.

While the ever-churning news cycle has made it more difficult to hold those in power accountable, the cartoon’s timely satire still galvanizes viewer attention. This makes it uniquely suited to channel rage toward Trump and other political leaders – and, perhaps, influence an audience that has recently proved elusive to Democrats.

A history of poking the powerful

The appeal of “South Park” doesn’t necessarily lie in partisan attacks on Republicans.

Its politics have always been all over the map, with both liberals and conservatives railing against the show at various points.

The 2006 episode “ManBearPig” ridiculed former Democratic Vice President Al Gore’s climate activism. In 2014, liberal critics decried an episode titled “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina” for deploying transphobic tropes. And “The Pandemic Special,” which aired in 2020, mocked the restrictive vaccine policies promoted by progressives.

Meanwhile, conservative watchdog groups such as the Parents Television and Media Council have long targeted “South Park” for its allegedly harmful influence on children. The none-too-subtly titled 1999 movie “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” satirized these efforts: Throughout the movie, Kyle’s mom, Sheila, tries to censor the graphic children’s cartoon characters Terrance and Phillip.

That movie also marks one of the earliest appearances of the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein. It portrays him as a crazed, lecherous supervillain hellbent on taking over the world alongside his gay lover, Satan.

The current “South Park” season has animated Trump with the same cutout, stop-motion style as it did with Hussein, implying direct parallels between their dictatorial desires. Behind the scenes, Trump has reportedly been “seething” over the depiction.

In the 2006 two-part episode “Cartoon Wars,” Parker and Stone warred with Comedy Central over the right to show an animated depiction of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

The network rejected the idea after political violence followed in the wake of a Danish newspaper’s publication of a cartoon featuring Muhammad. Eventually, censored animations of Muhammad aired with disclaimers from Comedy Central, but only after Parker and Stone’s refusal to address the issue before broadcast.

The cartoon continues to relish poking its corporate benefactors. The current season premiered hours after Trump’s Federal Communications Commission approved a merger for the show’s parent company, Paramount. The administration delayed the transaction in order to settle its lawsuit against the Paramount-owned news show “60 Minutes,” which Trump had accused of favorably editing an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris while she was running as the Democratic nominee for president.

That same day also saw the announcement of a new US$1.5 billion deal keeping “South Park” at Paramount. Parker and Stone’s skewering of Trump sends a message to Paramount in the wake of the “60 Minutes” settlement and the cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”: Let politics dictate your content at your own risk.

Reaching the right voters

As the Democratic Party’s establishment struggles to appeal to young, internet-savvy, male voters – look no further than party strategists’ attempts to find “a liberal Joe Rogan” – “South Park” is garnering record viewership with young audiences.

The rest of the season, meanwhile, has provided a timely, steady drumbeat of Trump mockery.

The second episode of the current season calls out the Trump administration’s illegal ICE raids. The next episode lampoons Trump’s affinity for lavish gifts and compliments. In it, tech CEOs and world leaders obsequiously note that Trump “does not have a small penis.” The fourth episode depicts him as a negligent and emotionally abusive lover to Satan, further connecting him to the show’s previous portrayals of Saddam Hussein.

Despite its penchant for outrageous and, at times, scattershot satire, “South Park” has an important lesson to teach Trump’s political opponents.

The appeal of both Trump and “South Park” to many young men is not in the positive ideas they offer, but in the way they both humiliate their opponents. I research comedy on the right, and I’ve written about how right-wing humor has long thrived on “owning the libs.” Now, “South Park” is owning Trump, and with each new lurid reveal in the Jeffrey Epstein saga, it will have plenty of fodder as the season progresses.

Simply calling attention to Trump’s hypocrisies and corruption – long the forte of media figures such as Jon Stewart, John Oliver and the hosts of the podcast “Pod Save America” – becomes white noise after a while.

But actually animating the sitting president with a micropenis? Making a mockery of the self-serving business deals of the “dealmaker in chief” and his spineless corporate cronies?

Well, those things won’t win an election on their own. But they inadvertently could help Democrats lure back some of the young men who drifted to Trump in 2024.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Nick Marx, Colorado State University

Read more:

• How liberals lost comedy − and helped Trump win
• For a primer on how to make fun of Nazis, look to Charlie Chaplin
• Is masculine anxiety spurring support for Trump among Gen Z?

Nick Marx does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.