The Trump Parody That's So Close Yet So Far

Since most people these days have the urge to spit, literally and rhetorically, in Trump's general direction, I watched the two new episodes of South Park that have particularly drawn the ire of Trump and those in his camp. Unfortunately, South Park generally seems so much better at making fun of liberals nowadays. The new episodes derive a lot of their Trump jokes from showing him naked with a small penis which actually reminds me of anti-Trump stuff from when he was first elected for his first term back in 2016 (God, nine years ago?!). I remember all the giant naked Trump babies at Comic Con and then, as now, the compulsion people have to see Trump naked really seems like it drifts into a zone of subconscious, genuine attraction for the man. The jokes themselves just aren't funny enough so it just seems like these people are lusting after him.

There were some conceptual things I liked in the new South Park episodes. I liked how they portrayed him exactly like they used to portray Saddam Hussein, complete with the same theme music and love affair with Satan. I also liked their portrayal of ICE as a gang of incompetent, hastily recruited unemployed guys of various ages. But the only thing I really thought was funny was the first joke in the first of the couple episodes, in which Cartman is angry that Trump cancelled NPR. It turns out Cartman loves NPR because he sees it as a kind of sideshow. That's when the show's at its best, when it forces you to see the logic in something that is clearly wrong. Oddly, it dovetails perfectly with the show's surprisingly keen instinct for how kids actually talk. It would be a kid who hasn't been instilled with an instinct to save face for one political faction or another who would even chain together a line of reasoning like this.