On the list of things that Donald Trump has ruined, Veep seems like relatively small potatoes. Still, it's something. The HBO program had to cut a joke because Trump's campaign was so outrageous that the joke happened in real life.
Showrunner David Mandel explained the stunning coincidence in a guest column written for The Hollywood Reporter.
"So much of Veep is often just sitting around thinking: ‘What's the dumbest thing that could happen?' They're doing stuff that we couldn't invent if we tried.The only thing we did have to change — it sounds like a bad joke, but it's true — was a ‘golden shower' joke in one of the episodes where someone is yelling at Jonah about a golden shower. We hadn't filmed it yet, and we realized, ‘Oh, we need to change that.'Who knew we would literally have to change a Veep golden showers joke because of the real president of the United States of America? It doesn't get any weirder than that."
Even crazier: That's not even the first time that this has happened. The writers had to cut a joke involving the female anatomy after the Access Hollywood tape surfaced. What does it say about America that our president is beating the most outrageous writers on TV to scatalogical punchlines? Well, nothing good.
We just hope that somehow, some way, he can stop doing this stuff so that Veep can stay the best political show on TV. We also hope that for other reasons, but we think the TV angle will really play with the commander-in-chief.