VEEP Creator Warns ‘Reality Is In Danger’ As ‘Elon Musks Of The World’ Align With Trump

(Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Armando Ianucci, the creator of political satire VEEP, said that he is “extremely worried” that “reality is in danger of being squeezed off the agenda as the “Elon Musks of this world” are “aligning themselves with the Trump narrative.”

In an editorial for the New York Times on Friday, Iannucci said how journalists had chased him for comment as Veep, which aired from 2012 to 2019, saw a resurgence in viewership in the wake of President Joe Biden’s decision not to run for re-election and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris as the new Democratic nominee.

Online, social media users made comparisons between the show’s inept fictional vice president Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Harris – usually in a bid to attack her candidacy.

In response to questions about how his work was being used, Iannucci said he was “worried” that “politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom.”

“In fact,” he wrote, “I fear we’ve now crossed some threshold where the choreographed image or manufactured narrative becomes the only reality we have left.”

Ianucci cited as proof the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, a moment that “so speedily transformed from real-time tragedy into iconography.” He also cited the “living meme” embraced by ear bandage-wearing attendees to the Republican National Convention, which, he wrote, “was not so much the choosing of a leader as the transfiguration of one — the Donald reborn as the One who brushed off death.”

What’s going on? The stuff happening out there right now is madder than Veep and deadly serious… This election will have real consequences, but reality is in danger of being squeezed off the agenda in favor of a heightened performance piece that calls itself the election but is actually a multimedia event, cut up and memed across social platforms, re-edited, rolled in conspiracy theory and baked under oodles of manipulated footage, ready to pop up on your last remaining sane aunt’s media feed.

The producer then made a call for “more reality” and less “contrived unreality” – urging voters to focus on policy issues like the environment and abortion – warning that the powerful media and social media moguls, like Elon Musk, who “determine the mayhem of truths and falsehoods,” are “aligning” with Trump.