A top former member of the Republican Party has explained why the opening episode of South Park’s 27th season hit President Donald Trump where it hurts.
“Remember, a lot of Trump’s base, they’re not Republicans. They’re just men—they’re guys who typically don’t belong to a party, they don’t vote all the time, and they watch South Park,” former Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh, who’s since defected to the Democrats, told MSNBC.
“They watched an episode this week where Trump looked really silly and stupid—a big fat man with a teeny, tiny penis. I think that kind of thing really dings Trump hard, too,” he added. “No pun intended.”
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Even by show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s famously filthy standards, this week’s episode of the long-running animated satire—described by the Guardian as their “most furious ever”—stood a cut above.
The 30-minute instalment features an exceptionally litigious cartoon version of the president who—between hopping into bed with Satan himself, only to find his sexual advances scorned on account of his vanishingly small manhood—threatens to sue literally anybody who refuses to “relax” about the ongoing Epstein files furor.
As its closing vignette, it also includes a deeply ironic pro-Trump political messaging ad in which a hyper-realistic AI version of an obese Trump waddles through the desert wearing few, then fewer, and eventually clothes at all, ending with the naked president collapsing belly-up in the sun before the oversized-gut-punching final line: “His penis is teeny tiny, but his love for us is large.”
The White House was unimpressed. “This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention,” a spokesperson said this week.
“President Trump has delivered on more promises in just six months than any other president in our country’s history, and no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak,” the White House said. A somewhat poor choice of words, given the desert setting of arguably the episode’s most offensive scene.
The show’s creators, for their part, have faced the political backlash head-on and in characteristically deadpan style. As Stone put it to the audience at San Diego’s Comic-Con on Thursday: “We’re terribly sorry.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
