Many fans of South Park are wondering why Donald Trump doesn’t attack the comedy series despite the show’s frequent attacks and lampoons against the president. While Trump has been known to target late-night hosts, like Seth Myers and Jimmy Kimmel, he has been relatively silent on the animated series created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. This is despite one of the comedy’s episodes revolving around the president having an affair with Satan and creating the Antichrist (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg). The satire is something that Trump does not find “funny,” according to former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci. However, comedian Patton Oswalt has an explanation for this seemingly unusual contradiction.
When asked why the Trump administration lets South Park get away with its political comedy but has attacked Stephen Colbert for doing the same, despite the animated series “arguably going against Trump harder than anyone else,” Oswalt offered one strong reason why this is in an interview with The Daily Beast.
“Nothing shuts Trump up like money,” the comedian explained. “He can argue that Stephen Colbert isn’t getting the ratings and isn’t making the money, even though the show is brilliant. But it’s not that Stephen Colbert is slipping in the ratings, it’s that the whole infrastructure of late-night television is slipping.”
As noted by Observer, major network late-night shows have faced a sharp decline over the past eight years. In this period, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon fell from 2.8 million to 1.2 million, Jimmy Kimmel Live! declined from 2.3 million to 1.8 million, and Late Night with Seth Meyers dropped from 1.4 million to 923,000. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which will end its run in May 2026, has seen a drop in viewership by 26 percent.
By comparison, South Park has nearly doubled its viewership since 2023 according to its creators, in part due to its emphasis on the Trump administration. Parker and Stone said in an interview with The New York Times that this shift in focus wasn’t because they “got all political,” but because “politics became pop culture.” Attacking Trump had become “taboo,” so while the creators only meant to have one episode in Season 28 involving the president, they expanded it in later episodes and discovered that they had found a mine for comedy.
These high ratings, according to Oswalt, have protected the series from being targeted by Trump on Truth Social and other platforms.
“And South Park, not only does it make insane amount of some money, it gets insane ratings,” he explained. “And Trump can only be so angry at that, because what Trump ultimately will respect, even if it doesn’t respect him, is something where the numbers are through the roof, and the money is through the roof.”
The comedian believes that the president’s worldview revolves around what is financially successful and doesn’t include whether something is critically successful.
He continued, “He can’t look at South Park and see how brilliant it is, and he can’t look at something like John Oliver and see how equally brilliant it is. All he can think of is in terms of, look at this guy’s numbers, look at their numbers, and that’s the only way he sees the world. So something that is as massive and as undeniable as South Park, both in quality, which people like you and I can see, but then in numbers and money, which Trump can see, he just falls silent.”
Oswalt concludes that if late-night shows were bringing in the ratings, Trump would hold his tongue. “If Colbert was making South Park money and getting South Park eyes on him, Trump wouldn’t know what to do.”
