LIFE IMITATES VEEP

‘Veep’ Star Reveals How Trump Turned Show Into a Nightmare

He’s unsure whether to laugh or cry.

Timothy Simons wants Veep to fade into obscurity.

“I would very much trade the long tail of the show for a better world,” Simons, who also stars as Sasha in the Netflix comedy Nobody Wants This, told Obsessed: The Podcast. “Like, ‘Oh, the show became irrelevant? F---ing great.’ That means something good was happening.”

The actor, 48, played the gangly, obnoxious White House staffer Jonah Ryan across all seven seasons of HBO’s hit satire Veep, which followed the day-to-day foibles of Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).

Veep aired from 2012-2019, overlapping with the first Trump administration. Viewers began noticing how President Donald Trump, 80, and his cronies echoed the show’s corrupt lewdness. Simons, though, laments that this is the case.

“If it happened with Obama, or with somebody who was actually trying to move the country in a better direction, and they f---ed up and it was a funny gaffe moment, and they put the Veep credits over it, I’d be fine with that,” he continued, alluding to the show’s popular meme. “But everything right now just feels too nightmarish for me to engage with it in that way.”

Jonah becomes a congressman in Season 5 and runs for president at the start of Season 7. His campaign, an insane combination of anti-vax rhetoric and opposition to Daylight Saving Time, no longer seems so far-fetched in the Trump era.

While considering a real-life counterpart for the erratic character, Simons thought of disgraced former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, whom President-elect Trump nominated as Attorney General in 2024. Gaetz quickly withdrew amid allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, and sex trafficking.

“Matt Gaetz was a good comp for a minute and got bounced in a very Jonah-esque way, which, God, even kind of happens in the show when Jonah ends up hooking up with someone, and she said she went to Georgetown; it turns out it was Georgetown Day School,” Simons said. “I mean, Matt Gaetz gets bounced for, like, ‘I didn’t know this prostitute was 17.’”

He added, “Allegedly,” and then clarified, “I just said that so I don’t get sued.”

Simons speculated that Jonah might also share qualities with Vice President JD Vance, 42, but the major divide between them is that “Jonah never had any morals to sell out.”

“There’s a difference there,” Simons continued. While Vance “once had a worldview and sold it out for power, Jonah never did.”

Though the Trump administration’s incompetence is sometimes comical, Simons still struggles to laugh. After Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House in September and before a federal judge blocked the ban, much of the White House press pool declined to cover his press conference. Audio was so bad that even right-wing commentators admitted they couldn’t hear his speech, leading to the president’s total humiliation.

It was a decidedly Veep moment, which Simons said was unique because Trump seemed to finally face consequences for his actions. Still, Simons wasn’t sure it was all that humorous, because it made him consider how rare comeuppance is for Trump.

“We now live in a consequence-free world,” Simons said, adding, “The thing that he needs and wants the most, which is for everyone to listen to him all the time, couldn’t happen. That seemed like the only actual consequence. But I don’t even know if I found it that funny.”

Nobody Wants This Season 3 is streaming now on Netflix.

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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