In a moment when Hollywood and the media are gripped by fear, Trey Parker and Matt Stone stepped to the mic and dropped a balls-out critique of President Trump and Paramount.

Nearly three decades after South Park debuted, its creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are still capable of displaying impeccable timing.

The animated comedy’s 27th season premiere, “Sermon on the ‘Mount,” arrived a week after CBS canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, apparently to appease the Trump administration and grease the wheels for a merger between CBS’ parent company Paramount and Skydance Media. It came only a few days after Parker and Stone closed a new five-year, $1.5 billion deal with Paramount for South Park streaming rights, which meant that this would be the first new episode to be made available the next day on Paramount+, rather than on HBO Max. And it debuted the night before Parker and Stone would be appearing on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con. The stars have rarely aligned as perfectly for the duo to take a shot at the biggest possible target, at a moment when they have the biggest possible spotlight on themselves. And boy, did they take advantage of it.

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On the one hand, it feels ironic that Parker and Stone are the ones to go this hard after Trump, since the governing philosophy of South Park for so long was that caring about anything is stupid, and that there’s essentially no difference between America’s two main political parties — an attitude that’s filtered down to multiple generations of people who grew up watching the show, and thus helped to create an environment where a self-involved, delusional grifter like Trump could get elected twice. That said, Parker and Stone have occasionally demonstrated regret over that attitude: In 2006, they ruthlessly mocked Al Gore’s attempts to warn people about climate change, then did a 2018 episode where the satirical target was now climate-change deniers, while Gore got a literal apology from the characters.

But Parker and Stone’s long history of making fun of earnestness in many ways makes them the ideal delivery system for an episode like this. Colbert was canceled because the president has thin skin and despises anyone who tells jokes about him, but Colbert was also preaching to the converted. That it was South Park bringing this savagery — not just making fun of Trump, but being so blunt and unsparing in its critique of him — is going to have far more impact, and get more attention, than a famously and unabashedly liberal TV host saying the same things.