South Park creators ignore Trump when show returns in 2025 | South Park

The creators of the Emmy-winning series South Park intend to ignore Donald Trump when the irreverent animated series returns for a 27th season in 2025, they said in a rare interview.

“I don't know what else we could say about Trump,” Matt Stone told Vanity Fair about the former US president, whose life seems to be dominated by pure drama.

Stone added that part of the strategy of deliberately avoiding mentions of the current Republican candidate for November's presidential election is that satirizing such a campaign could be “a real mind-boggling exercise.”

“We've tried to get South Park through four or five presidential elections, and it's so difficult,” said Stone, who launched the series with Trey Parker on Comedy Central in 1997. “And it seems like it's taking on an outsized importance.”

“Of course it's damn important, but it kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun,” he added in the interview published Thursday.

One of the reasons the latest season of South Park was given a tentative 2025 release date was to give Paramount+ — the platform that now streams the series — time to “sort out all their crap,” Stone noted. But Stone also said, “honestly, it's intentional” that he and Parker skip the election campaign between Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

The stance Stone outlined to Vanity Fair stands in stark contrast to the way South Park handled the 2016 presidential election, which Trump unexpectedly won over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In the series, an elementary school teacher voiced by Parker ran for president, defeated Clinton, and sat in the Oval Office for several seasons, adopting a look and style clearly inspired by Trump.

Thursday's interview with Vanity Fair described how Stone and Parker “made a mad 36-hour sprint to shoot an episode about the 2016 election after being stunned (like most of the country) by Trump's victory.”

Trump has since given commentators – satirical and otherwise – plenty of other fodder, including his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden and his conviction in May for criminally falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star who had accused him of extramarital sexual relations.

Among numerous other legal problems, he faces three other criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn his defeat to Biden, as well as leaking government secrets after his presidency – and he survived an assassination attempt at a political rally in July.

South Park revolves around the adventures of a group of four boys, mostly vulgar, growing up in a Colorado town. The series has satirized an overwhelmingly wide range of topics in a profane way, garnering a good reputation among critics and establishing itself as an unusually long-running show, although some viewers found the content too offensive.

Its creators are also famous for their Tony-winning musical “The Book of Mormon” as well as the cult classics “BASEketball” and “Team America: World Police.”