Veep cast roasts Trump with opening warning message for Harris fundraising reunion

The cast of the popular political satire Veep, which ran from 2012-2019, have gotten back together for a special reunion hosted by Stephen Colbert, to raise funds for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign that featured a dig at Donald Trump.

The reunion, which the Hollywood Reporter states raised $735,000 (£551,000), saw Julia Louis-Dreyfus reprise her role as Selina Meyer, the self-centred politician at the heart of the sitcom who connives her way to the top of US politics.

Given the topic of the show, written by Armando Iannucci, and the current climate in the United States, it perhaps wasn’t a surprise that jokes about Trump started almost immediately.

As audiences tuned in for the table read, they were greeted with a message read by Gary Cole, who played senior strategist Kent Davidson in the show, which said: “No dogs or cats were eaten during the making of this program.”

Saturday Night Live made a similar joke during their cold open on 28 September episode. The gag is an obvious nod to Trump claiming that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were “eating dogs” and “eating the cats” during the 10 September debate with Harris.

The jokes about the election didn’t stop there though, as Matt Walsh, who played press secretary Mike McLintock asserted that: “Kamala Harris is not Selina Meyer and Selina Meyer is not Kamala Harris.”

In character, he added: “Selina Meyer is, however, one of the other candidates running for president this year. Selina Meyer is Donald Trump.”

This comes after many had noted the similarities between the real-life events of Harris’s ascension to the Democrat Party candidate and how Meyer became president in Veep.

Following news of Biden’s exit from the race and his subsequent endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, a clip from Veep went viral on social media in which Selina is seen telling her shocked team that she is running for president.

“I’m not leaving. POTUS is leaving. He’s not going to run for a second term,” she says in the brief video. “I’m gonna run. I’m gonna run for president!”

During the reunion, the cast read the script from the season three episode “Crate”, which the aforementioned quotes come from.

Along with Louis-Dreyfus, Cole and Walsh, the rest of the reunion cast included Tony Hale, Anna Chlumsky, Reid Scott, Timothy Simons, Sam Richardson, Sarah Rutherland, Clea DuVall and Sufe Bradshaw.

Larry David also made an appearance, stepping in for Kevin Dunn, who was unable to make the event. Not unlike his Curb Your Enthusiasm alter-ego, David had a typically awkward moment where couldn’t find the unmute button on the Zoom link.

This is not the first time that people have taken note of similarities between Veep and real-life politics.

In June, Iannucci compared a bizarre plotline in another one of his shows, The Thick of It, to the Conservative Party’s immigration initiative, which would have enforced a yearly limit on the number of UK visas issued.