Have you noticed how so many media outlets have gone soft on President Donald Trump? Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, The Daily Show, etc.. All are now treating Trump with kids gloves.
Yes, yes! Of course I'm just kidding. The fact is that the mainstream media in both its news and entertainment shows have presented an almost solid wall of total hostility towards Trump. So what happens when just one entertainment show treats Trump as a side character without weighing in on how evil he supposedly is?
Well, that happened on Wednesday when South Park had a President Donald Trump character (actually avatar) who played a relatively minor role with nothing to indicate total condemnation of him. The result was immediate hostility towards the South Park creators from Charles Bramesco in the Vulture section of New York magazine who whined that South Park Goes Soft on Donald Trump in ‘Witch Hunt’ Episode:
Though there’s never really a “good” time for such a thing, it’s an especially unfortunate week for South Park to run an episode as frivolous and insubstantial as “Sons a Witches” all the same. The Village Voice ran a lacerating feature titled “South Park Blinks” a few days ago, lamenting the show’s inability to fully satirize Trump and its failure to recognize its own place in his paradigm. Writer Lara Zarum rather astutely notes that Trump has been more of a background presence this season, an accessory to stories that aren’t necessarily about him.
GASP! How can a show ever present Donald Trump without quickly signaling to the viewer that he is the epitome of evil?
As if in a directly affirmative response, “Sons a Witches” returns not just to glance over a sensitive topic in the most vague and perfunctory way possible, but to suggest that Trump can be another supporting character in a densely populated cut-paper universe.
Yup! You can never have Trump as a mere supporting character without ham handed condemnation of him:
In typical South Park fashion, events escalate from the silly to the fully absurd, as the witches’ campaign to preempt a witch hunt encompasses a hokey school assembly with a desperate “We’re All on the Same Side” musical number. This is a joke that many others made when Woody Allen said he was hoping to avoid a “Salem atmosphere,” only without the waffling that drained it of all its force. Donald Trump then gets introduced as the lazy deus ex machina who fixes everything, probably because the writers realized they’d painted themselves into a narrative corner by introducing a villain too powerful for anyone in South Park to stop. Believe it or not, Trump is the good guy here, though he’s represented through the avatar of Mr. Garrison. Either way, in lucidly and rationally using his presidential powers to avert a dangerous situation, this portrayal rings false.
In the liberal bubble world any portrayal of Trump, even it is only just slightly positive, must ring false.
