Donald Trump can be very funny. There’s no getting around this simple fact, and trying to will it away has been a huge tactical error by the Democrats since 2016. However, the President has one thing in common with these liberal scolds: for all his comic timing, he can’t take a joke. To be a true comedian, you need to have a sense of your own absurdity.

This week, animated comedy South Park aired the first episode of its 27th season, “Sermon on the Mount”, in which writers Matt Stone and Trey Parker poked fun at the notoriously thin-skinned Trump. The depiction clearly had an effect inside the White House, which published a statement in response saying that “no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak.” Of course, it would have been cooler to shrug the episode off. So much for Elon Musk promising comedy would be “legal” again under MAGA 2.0.

“Sermon on the Mount”, and the resulting discourse, comes amid several authoritarian moves by Trump against the media. Having sued CBS over an edited 60 Minutes segment, the President this month received a settlement of $16 million from the channel’s parent company, Paramount Global, which at the same time was seeking federal approval for an $8 billion merger with Skydance. Last week, CBS announced that it had cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which had criticised the payment to Trump.

Each episode of South Park is produced in just six days, allowing the cartoon to work in topical stories. “Sermon on the Mount” opens with the character of Eric Cartman lamenting that “woke is dead” and edgy language is back, meaning his personality has lost its transgressive edge. Meanwhile, Christianity is being imposed at South Park Elementary, with Jesus now living at the school. Outraged parent Randy Marsh calls the President, revealed to be a photorealistic Donald Trump, who sues anyone acting in defiance of him. After Randy’s call, Trump sues the entire town.

The writers then portray Trump, equipped with a micropenis, hopping into bed with Satan, who grills him about the Epstein files. The episode concludes with the town agreeing to settle with Trump for $3.5 million, but there’s a proviso: they have to make a PSA, which ends up involving a deepfaked version Trump stripping completely naked in the desert from heat exhaustion. Once again, the diminutive manhood features.

Needless to say, this isn’t especially sophisticated comedy. South Park tends to announce its jokes with a klaxon, and its recent work has none of the layered irony of, say, The Simpsons at its peak. Yet Trump’s humourless response goes some way in justifying this blunt approach. The episode’s sharpest humour comes from its portrayal of institutional cowardice, including a scene in which 60 Minutes nervously praises Trump while distancing itself from protestors.

Parker and Stone are equal-opportunity offenders, having mocked everything from Obama worship and PC culture to George Clooney’s smugness. It’s also worthy of note that the show is willing to take shots at the very company with which it has just signed a $1.5 billion deal. South Park has stayed true to itself through successive administrations, and through periods of censoriousness from both the Left and the Right. It may be puerile, but at least it’s remained pure.

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Rory Kiberd is a freelance writer. He has written book reviews for the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, and the Sunday Business Post, as well as film reviews for Totally Dublin.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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