Veep is funny, but the danger of Trump no laughing matter

As soon as President Biden dropped out of the race, leaving his vice president to take on the candidacy, a pile-on of news organisations tracked me down to ask for comment. They weren’t after any insights on Kamala Harris’s campaign (I have none) but instead wanted to know how I felt now that events were tracking the main story line of my HBO show Veep.

The show stars the unbeatable Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Vice President Selina Meyer. As the series progresses, Selina is suddenly thrown onto the main stage when the president decides not to run for a second term, leaving her to go into the convention as the new presumptive nominee. For 24 hours, the mainstream media asked if I was pleased with the comparison.

This is the first time I’m setting out a definitive answer to that question, and the answer is: No, I’m not. I’m extremely worried! Not about Harris. I’m sure she’ll inject much-needed sharpness into the campaign. What worries me is 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.

Julia Louis Dreyfus out on the campaign trail as the fictional Vice President Selina Meyer.Credit: Showcase

In fact, I fear we’ve now crossed some threshold where the choreographed image or manufactured narrative becomes the only reality we have left. Look how the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which happened only two weeks ago, so speedily transformed from real-time tragedy into iconography. No sooner had Trump ducked for cover when some indefinable Trumpy-sense clicked on, calculating with acute precision how best to turn the moment of survival into a sequence of living memes, first by asking for his shoes, perhaps so he could be seen to exit at full height, and then raising a fist to the clouds, mouthing, “Fight, fight, fight”. Someone died in that mindless violence, but what does it say about the supremacy of the defining visual that Trump commemorated the moment at his party’s convention by caressing the victim’s uniform live onstage?

Donald Trump’s first instinct after an assassination attempt was to transform the moment into a meme.Credit: AP

Which brings us to the Republican convention in Milwaukee. The convention was not so much the choosing of a leader as the transfiguration of one – the Donald reborn as the One who brushed off death as if it were some loser mosquito whack job. With humility he declared himself chosen and protected by God, the sly implication being that while Biden was slowly stumbling toward his end, Trump was most likely immune from his. For 20 minutes Trump spoke with saintly measure of how he was going to unite the country and then for an hour more made it clear he would do this by delegitimising every alternative point of view.

Heretics, including Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, promptly repented, with conviction in their voices and deadness in their eyes, and a collective hosanna rose from the assembly, many wearing anointed ear bandages to cover the stigmata they prayed would one day afflict the sides of their own heads. The whole event was about making us believe in Trump’s Second Coming (or his third, if you’re one of those who think his second came in 2020, but that was stolen and everyone knows it).

Donald Trump declared himself chosen by God at the Republican Convention.Credit: AP

What’s going on? The stuff happening out there right now is madder than Veep and deadly serious. These are real events, not melodramatic fictions, and they have a real impact on our lives. Depending on who wins, either we’ll continue our attempts to halt global warming, or we’ll sit back and melt in our sleep. America’s legal and electoral systems will either function on behalf of its people or continue to be shaped in the image of those who can afford the most annoyingly persistent lawyer. Women will either have autonomy over their own bodies or be subject to the whims of a judge hassled by the very same annoying and persistent lawyers.

This election will have real consequences, but reality is in danger of being squeezed off the agenda in favour 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.

As someone from Britain, I can assure you it doesn’t have to be like this. We just elected a government very much aware that its job is to deal with an awful lot of complicated reality. This was partly in reaction to the madness of one recent prime minister, Liz Truss, who spent much of her political career posting photos of herself in front of colourful backdrops rather than doing anything constructive, so that when she became prime minister, she quickly imploded into a compacted ball of nothing. She thought she was an Instagram politician but turned out to be a Snapchat one and swiftly disappeared.

And so to Biden’s decision not to run. Against the contrived unreality of his opponent, his decision to get real might have been the only weapon he had left in his armory. Rather than counter with a similarly ambitious fiction that he was Super Joe who could power through on self-belief alone, he looked at the facts, stared reality in the mirror and did the one thing he could do to avoid oblivion.

More reality will be needed in the months to come, not least because the Elon Musks of this world seem to be aligning themselves with the Trump narrative. These are the people who determine the mayhem of truths and falsehoods that push themselves into our attention, which means the coming election may well become a choice between two competing versions of reality: one we can control ourselves and one they tell us is the only one available.

Armando Iannucci is a television and movie director and producer whose hits include the HBO series Veep.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.