Why President Trump Will Never Attack 'South Park'

The Comedy Central satire of the president has been crass and brilliant over its latest run of episodes. But the president has remained uncharacteristically silent on the matter.

'South Park' season 27, episode 5: "Conflict of Interest." 'South Park' Season 27, Episode 5; "Conflict of Interest"

Months after the second Trump administration took shape and the president’s flurry of executive orders began to generate the chilling effects of potential authoritarianism, South Park fearlessly kicked off with an almost unbelievably shocking moment. Struggling through the desert, an actor portraying the president of the United States lying naked and sunstroked, desperate to deliver America’s voters from temptation, listened to an endorsement message from his tiny, talking penis. Months later, South Park’s latest run now looks like it will conclude with the leader of the free world fathering the Antichrist via his extramarital affair with Satan. In between, South Park’s flapping-head cut-out depiction of Donald Trump — petulant, philandering, self-serving and deceptive to all — has made clandestine attempts to abort his unborn child and bedded his VP in the Lincoln Bedroom and then manipulated the media into believing footage of the tryst was a mere deepfake

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During his run as the 45th U.S. president, Trump and the rest of the world learned of the unique power his tweets can hold. They are, at their most pointed and powerful, the equivalent of throwing a lit match into the fireworks factory. Ratings will jump, clips will recirculate to reach viral status and podcasts will have to splice in extra segments if his words hit their target as intended. In fact, in the world of comedy, a direct hit from Trump could be considered a career highlight — a notion that’s been shared by several late night hosts. So when Trump doesn’t engage, it isn’t restraint, but a refusal to allow that power to be weaponized in a battle he won’t win.

For South Park, a show produced under tight deadlines to keep the satire as up-to-the-moment as possible, entering such a fight with a sitting president is a coveted scenario. Parker and Stone have built an empire on goading the powerful into reacting, so a feud with Trump would be their personal Super Bowl. Trump and his camp certainly know this and refuse to take any bait. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before with this president and other critical institutions and individuals who hold a similar power rooted in sharp, popular satire.

As South Park once said, The Simpsons already did it. That other beloved animated series has had a decades-long relationship with Trump that has ranged from a prophetic gag about a future President Trump made way back in 2000 to its more recent depictions of a Trump-led, gleefully dystopian nation. But The Simpsons is now so enshrined in pop culture that even Trump gets that the optics of picking a fight with America’s longest-running sitcom has no upside. Without an easy-to-smush foe or potential voters to win over, why take the risk? And he may even recall that the much-touted battle between Bart Simpson and Bill Cosby in the early 1990s left one of the two standing, and the winner had a slingshot in his back pocket.

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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/donald-trump-south-park-will-never-attack-show-1236436589/