The most scathing 'South Park' parodies, including President Trump
The most scathing 'South Park' parodies, including President Trump
Brendan Morrow, USA TODAYThu, August 13, 2026 at 5:51 PM UTC
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Twenty-nine years ago today, a group of foul-mouthed Colorado kids changed television history.
On Aug. 13, 1997, the first episode of "South Park," a new crudely animated, profane cartoon aimed squarely at mature audiences, premiered on Comedy Central. Across nearly 30 seasons, multiple specials and a feature film, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have maintained their reputation for unsparingly taking aim at everything and everybody in shockingly brutal, often controversial ways.
Most recently, the past two seasons of "South Park" have been laser-focused on taking down President Donald Trump. But since its 1997 premiere, just about every famous figure in Hollywood and beyond has been spoofed on "South Park" at one point or another, some more viciously than others.
As the show celebrates its 29th anniversary with a 24-hour marathon on Comedy Central, take a look back at some of the most scathing "South Park" parodies ever.
President Donald Trump
"South Park" took on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential bid beginning with its September 2015 episode "Where My Country Gone?", though without actually depicting Trump. Instead, the boys' teacher Mr. Garrison served as a stand-in, who rants and raves against immigrants from Canada in unhinged ways.
The episode also featured a brash Canadian president who bears a striking resemblance to Trump: He's said to have been elected, despite having no real solutions, because he said outrageous things that people found amusing, and the episode concludes with Kyle warning that America should not make the same mistake.
Mr. Garrison continued functioning as the series' Trump stand-in into the president's first administration. But in 2025, the episode "Sermon on the 'Mount" marked a major shift: Trump himself was now an actual character, and his depiction was virtually a cut-and-paste from how the show previously spoofed Saddam Hussein. Trump was now shown, using real photos of him placed crudely onto a cartoon body, as a thin-skinned, comically evil bully with a small penis who is literally in bed with Satan.
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From then on, the show continued doubling down on depicting Trump in the worst light imaginable. Just about every subsequent episode was focused heavily on relentlessly mocking him and members of his administration, who wind up entangled in a wild storyline about Trump's romance with Satan and the birth of the Antichrist.
Bono
It doesn't get much less subtle than this: The Season 11 episode "More Crap" depicted U2 singer Bono as being, literally, a giant piece of poop.
The 2007 episode sees Stan's father Randy Marsh attempting to prove he took the biggest poop in world history. He learns that Bono, who is depicted as self-obsessed and unhealthily focused on being the best at everything, was the previous record-holder, and the singer becomes determined to maintain his record.
But it's later revealed that Bono, himself, is actually a six-foot-tall piece of feces. "How could Bono be so talented, so caring, and yet seem like such a piece of crap?" one character asks. "Because he is crap."
Paris Hilton
A vicious 2004 episode mocked the public's obsession with Paris Hilton, who is rendered as a spoiled drunk who is so abrasive and obnoxious that her dog, Tinkerbell, dies by suicide to get away from her.
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At the time, Hilton dismissed the episode in an interview, noting she had not watched it, but "when people copy you, that's like the most flattering thing, so whatever people can say, I just laugh about it. It doesn't matter to me."
She later said in her 2023 memoir that it "upset me that the episode graphically portrays" her dog's death, per The Hollywood Reporter. "The thought of that made me sick," she wrote. "I've been involved in some pretty edgy media, but I don’t even know where something like that comes from."
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Caitlyn Jenner
The same year that Caitlyn Jenner came out as a trans woman, "South Park" pointedly took aim at her in the Season 19 episode "Stunning and Brave," in which Kyle receives detention for maintaining that Jenner is not a hero. "I think she's most likely not a very good person," he says, refusing to give in to pressure to praise her.
The following week, Jenner appears in an episode that mocks her physical appearance and shows her running over multiple pedestrians in her car, a reference to Jenner's 2015 car crash that resulted in the death of 69-year-old Kim Howe. Jenner was not charged in connection with the crash. She settled a lawsuit brought by Howe's stepchildren.
In another episode later that season, Jenner was again shown driving erratically and plowing into a group of people.
Tom Cruise
The show took aim at Tom Cruise, specifically, and the Church of Scientology in general, in one of its most infamous episodes of all time: 2005's "Trapped in the Closet."
From Season 9, the episode questioned the "War of the Worlds" star's sexuality in an indirect, roundabout way by having Cruise literally hide inside a closet and refuse to come out, allowing characters to say things like, "Tom Cruise won't come out of the closet!"
The episode also featured an explanation of the Church of Scientology's belief system, which was accompanied by cheeky on-screen text that read, "This is what Scientologists actually believe."
At the time, Reuters reported that Cruise threatened not to promote his film, "Mission: Impossible III," unless a rerun of the episode was pulled (both Comedy Central and Paramount were owned by Viacom). Representatives for Cruise and Paramount denied this, though Comedy Central did scrap a repeat of the episode.
Barbra Streisand
Barbra Streisand has been spoofed a number of times over the show's history, going back to its very first season. In the 1998 episode "Mecha-Streisand," the EGOT winner shows up to South Park to enact a plan to become "the biggest, most famous person ever" and winds up kidnapping the boys. She tortures them by making them listen to her terrible singing, which causes them to scream in pain.
Streisand ends up transforming into a giant, mechanical Mechagodzilla-style monster, who stomps around and terrorizes the town until the National Guard has to be called in. Parker and Stone have said the parody was driven by genuine contempt for Streisand.
"Whenever we make fun of a celebrity, usually, we don't even know them, and we're not making fun of them, we're making fun of the fact that our culture embraces them so much," Parker said on "Late Night with Conan O’Brien" in 1999. "Except with Barbra Streisand. We really hate her."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The most scathing 'South Park' parodies, including President Trump
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