South Park rips into Trump’s crypto ties in latest episode

Animated comedy series South Park mocked US President Donald Trump in its latest episode aired on Wednesday, with one part satirizing his ties to crypto.

The episode titled “Sickofancy,” depicted scenes showing parodied versions of tech executives wanting to curry favour with Trump by lining up to give him gifts and lap him with praise.

In two separate scenes, what appears to be a depiction of Microsoft CEO Sundar Pichai and venture capitalist-turned White House crypto and artificial intelligence czar David Sacks are lining up to gift Bitcoin (BTC) to Trump.

Source: David Sacks

Trump’s critics have raised concerns over the president’s pro-crypto policy positions while he and his family have deepened ties to crypto with a trading platform, stablecoin, tokens and a crypto mining business.

South Park’s latest Trump roast

The latest South Park episode mainly satirizes overreliance on AI, with a character pivoting his cannabis farm into an AI startup after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid arrests his workers.

The character eventually gets advice from a sycophantic ChatGPT to butter up Trump and have him re-classify cannabis to save his business. The show depicts officials and tech executives, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, lining up at the Oval Office to flatter Trump and give him gifts.

A screenshot of the episode depicting Microsoft’s Sundar Pichai (third from left) holding a Bitcoin and Apple’s Tim Cook (center). Source: South Park/Paramount

The episode also parodies Trump’s recent deployment of the National Guard in the nation’s capital, depicting Washington, DC, as overrun with military at major landmarks and continues its gag of depicting Trump with a small penis and sleeping with Satan, along with portraying Vice President JD Vance as a chubby-faced toddler.

White House has slammed South Park over Trump jokes

South Park’s 27th season debuted in late July, and its first two episodes heavily ripped on Trump and his administration, which caught the ire of the White House.

The season’s debut focused on Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris — Paramount recently paid $1.5 billion for the streaming rights to South Park.

Related: Illinois governor blasts Trump’s ‘crypto bros’ in new bill signing

The debut episode included an AI-generated deepfake of Trump, who strips naked in a desert, which prompted a White House spokesperson to call South Park a “fourth-rate show” that “hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.”

South Park’s other crypto quips

South Park has been on air for almost 28 years and has given a comedic parody of crypto a handful of times.

An episode in 2022 ridiculed Matt Damon’s then-recent promotion for Crypto.com, and an earlier episode that aired in 2021 joked that a character had the power to convince people that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were a “viable investment.”

Another episode in 2021 showed Bitcoin being used as the mainstream means of payment in the future, with a character saying, “We’ve all decided centralized banking is rigged, so we trust more in fly-by-night Ponzi schemes.”

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