After President Joe Biden announced he would be suspending his 2024 presidential campaign with Vice President Kamala Harris stepping in to take his place, memes and clips from HBO's political satire Veep have been circulating all over social media.
The series even saw a 353% surge in viewership on July 22, the day after Biden made his announcement. Veep follows the political career of Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and while there are some striking similarities between Meyer and Harris, especially with recent events, this isn't the first time Veep has seemingly predicted the future of American politics. In a recent essay for the New York Times, creator Armando Iannucci made it clear that Veep was a work of fiction, but that the real life version of events isn't so funny.
Veep
TV-MA
Comedy
Where to Watch
- stream
- rent
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Not available
*Availability in US
- Release Date
- April 22, 2012
- Creator
- Armando Iannuci
- Cast
- Julia Louis-Dreyfus , Anna Chlumsky , Tony Hale , Reid Scott , Timothy Simons , Matt Walsh , Kevin Dunn , Gary Cole
- Seasons
- 7
- Main Genre
- Comedy
- Studio
- HBO
10 First Female Vice President Taking Over After the President Steps Down
This is the Veep plot line that's been frequently alluded to ever since Biden suspended his campaign and Harris stepped in, and though there was a similar turn of events for Veep's Vice President Meyer, there are some key differences. In the Season 2 finale, President Hughes decides he will not run for a second term so he can spend more time with his wife, who is experiencing mental health issues, and Selina bides her time before announcing her own presidential campaign in Season 3. In Season 3, Episode 8, after the Meyer campaign suffers a PR disaster, all hope seems lost until senior strategist Kent Davison (Gary Cole) tells Selina that President Hughes has stepped down after the First Lady attempted to take her own life. This makes Selina the acting president from January until November 2016, when she eventually loses the election.
There are two particular clips from Veep that have been circulating since Biden dropped out and Harris began her campaign. One from the Season 2 finale where Selina runs into a closet to silently celebrate after White House Chief of Staff Ben Cafferty (Kevin Dunn) tells her President Hughes is not planning to run for re-election, leaving an opening for her to run instead. The other, in Season 3, Episode 8, when Kent informs Selina that Hughes is stepping down from the presidency altogether, and she and her Personal Aide Gary Walsh (Tony Hale) celebrate hysterically in a public bathroom. Both have been used to humorously theorize what Harris' reaction to Biden dropping out may have been like.
9 Conspiracy Theorists in Congress
Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons) is one of Veep's best "love to hate them" characters, who starts the series as an annoying White House staffer and the recipient of some of Veep's best and cruelest insults. Jonah is fired from his position as a White House liaison under President Hughes after he's exposed as the owner of a gossip-tainment site called West Wing Man, and later creates a new website called Ryantology that he uses to lambast Selina. By the end of the series, Jonah evolves into a radical right-wing, conspiracy-brained Congressman whose lack of political acumen and political correctness actually works to his advantage. He's ignorant, misogynistic, and xenophobic, and uses his platform as a New Hampshire Representative to push conspiracy theories, wage war on Daylight Saving Time, oppose the Healthy School Lunch Act, and more.
Jonah's rhetoric and ad-hominem attacks resemble those of former President Donald Trump, and his policies, political stunts, and penchant for conspiracy theories are comparable to representatives like Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert, among others. If Veep were still on the air today, Jonah would likely be deep into Q-ANON.
8 Jonah's Attack on "Muslim Math"
Speaking of Jonah, during his campaign for president in Season 7, Jonah takes aim at "Muslim math" in a campaign speech ("Algebra? More like Al Jazeera"), outraged that "Islamic math" is being taught to children all over the country. As president, he vows to ban "Sharia math," ending his speech by chanting "No more math! No more math!"
Just a couple of months after this episode aired in April 2019, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson did a segment on his show Tucker Carlson Tonight during which he discussed the “tyrannical" metric system, later interviewing James Panero, a self-proclaimed "anti-metrite." In 2023, after the California Board of Education updated their standards with a focus on "ensuring equity and excellence in math learning for all students," conservative critics called it "woke math."
7 Count Every Vote / Stop the Count
In the season finale of Veep Season 4, Selina ties with Senator Bill O'Brien (Brad Leland) in the presidential election, winning the popular vote but tying for the electoral vote. In the state of Nevada, O'Brien leads by just half a percent, which would allow for a recount. Selina, of course, demands a recount, as winning Nevada's six electoral votes would secure her the presidency. The Meyer campaign plants a group of protestors in Nevada who call for all the votes to be counted, but when it's discovered that the missing votes from Washoe County favor O'Brien, they're forced to change their tune from "count every vote" to "stop the count."
Almost the exact same thing happened during the 2020 election when former President Trump lost to President Joe Biden, with Trump demanding a recount in Wisconsin while also calling for vote counting to stop in states he was losing, like Pennsylvania and Georgia. "Stop the steal" became his supporters' slogan of choice. After these similarities were pointed out by The Daily Beast, Veep executive producer David Mandel tweeted, "Life imitates art and then beats the s*** out of it with a crowbar."
6 Selina’s Private Email Scandal
Back in Veep Season 1, while Selina is still vice president, a Secret Service agent is reassigned after Selina complains about him smiling on the job, leading to a White House request to publish all the Secret Service office personnel records, including her emails. Amy Brookheimer (Anna Chlumsky), Selina's Chief of Staff, suggests they release all of their records instead, strategically revealing some embarrassing information to prove they have nothing to hide. A few years later, former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would be embroiled in a very similar scandal.
Iannucci discussed this moment of accidental foresight in a 2015 interview with The Daily Beast, saying, "In the very first season she was under fire for her emails, so she had all her emails released, and the federal government had to read them all. And Hillary Clinton’s going through that right now. It happened to Selina four years ago. It’s surreal. Nothing you can come up with is as crazy as something that has actually happened in real life."
5 Selina's "Bebop speaking"
Vice President Harris' speeches and general manner of speaking have often been compared to Selina's. In 2022, The Daily Show compiled a number of clips of both Harris and Selina's speeches, and it's hard not to hear the similarities, especially their shared ability to talk in circles. There are a number of hilarious moments demonstrating Selina's questionable oratory skills, like her Joint Session speech in Season 4, Epsiode 1, during which her teleprompter goes blank, forcing her to improvise. Dan Egan (Reid Scott), one of Selina's senior advisors, dubs this "bebop speaking."
Selina's words and delivery of lines like, "The past was once the future. The future is unknown, it is in fact unknowable," brings to mind some of Harris' strangest soundbites that have been endlessly memed all over the Internet like, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
4 The 2013 Government Shutdown
In Veep Season 2, Selina is blamed for a government shutdown, which leaves trash piled on the streets and "nonessential" government employees furloughed. Her Director of Communications, Mike McLintock (Matt Walsh), is forced to deal with a PR crisis when a hiker is killed by a bear, since national park rangers were furloughed. Just four months after this episode aired in June 2013, there was a real government shutdown for the first time in almost twenty years, which lasted for sixteen days.
In a 2013 interview with The Daily Beast, when asked about his decision to incorporate a government shutdown into a Veep episode, Iannucci said, "We saw so many comic possibilities. Can you imagine being told you’re “not essential”? Or having to pare your team down and then operate? And when the country is suffering, and you’re the vice president, you have to make it look like you’re not living in luxury. The fact that it felt like an exaggerated version of what was happening at the time was ripe for comic possibility."
3 Calls for Violence Against Immigrants
During one of Jonah's inflammatory campaign speeches in Season 7, he mentions immigrants bringing diseases into the country, prompting one of his supporters to scream "kill them!" Jonah replies, “Well, we don’t have to kill all of them. I mean, there are some good immigrants, [like] Beyoncé."
In a 2019 Trump rally in Florida, something horrifyingly similar happened almost beat by beat, as pointed out by CNN's John Berman. As Trump wondered out loud how to handle illegal immigration, one of his supporters yelled "kill them!" Trump laughed and proceeded to joke, "That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement." Though the Veep scene was meant to morbidly satirize right-wing extremism, the real life version of events isn't funny at all.
2 Jonah's Anti-vax Arc
During Jonah's presidential campaign, he leans further into extremism by speaking out against vaccinations. Jonah rallies against vaccines during his campaign speeches, and his wife Beth (Emily Pendergast) makes an off-hand comment about not vaccinating her son because vaccines "cause autism," a common myth perpetuated by anti-vaxxers. In Episode 6, Jonah contracts chicken pox from Beth's son and causes a massive outbreak, infecting the attendees of his campaign rallies in areas with some of the lowest vaccination rates in the country.
A similar story about a Kentucky teenager broke just days after the episode aired in May 2019, and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic that began less than a year later, there were countless stories of antivaxxers and/or politicians who openly downplayed the magnitude of COVID-19 later contracting the disease. In July 2020, former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain died from complications due to COVID-19 after openly refusing to wear masks, and was diagnosed just nine days after attending a Trump rally in Oklahoma full of fellow maskless Trump supporters.
1 Selina's Fireworks Speech
In Season 4, Episode 3, when Selina advocates for her Families First Bill during an interview with CBS, she mentions a young girl from Alabama who is HIV positive via breast milk, who this bill would greatly benefit. Though she doesn't name the girl, Reddit users are able to figure out her identity and expose it to the world, leaving the young girl and her family ostracized by their community. When it's revealed that this information was obtained through a data breach by someone in Selina's camp, it becomes a PR disaster for her administration and presidential campaign. Selina decides to give a statement on the matter after a campaign rally, but her words are barely audible thanks to the fireworks going off directly behind her.
Something eerily similar happened following Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death in 2020, when former President Trump reacted to the news for the first time after a campaign rally in Minnesota. While walking back to Air Force One, a reporter tells him the news of her passing and Trump gives a solemn statement about the late Supreme Court Justice while Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" blares in the background. Both scenarios are morbidly funny as Selina and Trump attempt to give thoughtful, improvised statements about a serious issue while being drowned out by noise in the background that's totally unbecoming of the situation.
KEEP READING: There's Never Been a Better Time to Watch 'Veep'
