These Episodes Of 'Veep' Predicted The Future

By the end of Veep, which concluded on HBO after seven seasons, the show struggled to satirize reality. The final season aired during the middle of President Donald Trump’s first presidency. By then, a lot of political and social norms were shattered by Trump, a man who had no trouble embroiling himself in scandal. 

David Mandel, the showrunner for the last three seasons, even credited the political landscape of that time period with changing the series ending. “There was something about the way politics had changed that made me start thinking about things differently,” Mandel told Thrillist in 2019. “I started to wonder, ‘Why is Selina Meyer the only politician on earth paying the price for her own brutality? In places all over the world, horrible people are being elected.”

Madel cited the election of Trump, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines as examples of people accused of terrible things getting elected to their respective nation’s highest office. “She gets exactly what she wanted, but it's horrible,” Mandel continued. “And how do you make it horrible? She wins the presidency, but the cost is her soul.”

This awareness of what was actually occurring in the real world; the careful observation of what people will do in the pursuit of power allowed Veep to foresee the future far beyond its own characters' endings. Here are three episodes that predicted the present. 

Season 7, Episode 4, “South Carolina”

Just weeks after Zohran Mamdani was elected as the next mayor of New York City, a satirical news post began to circulate suggesting that the young Muslim politician would be using “Arabic numerals,” in New York City classrooms. While many were quick to catch on that the term simply describes numbers, others devolved into an Islamaphobic panic, which required publications like Newsweek to write clarifying articles that there was no such plan from Mamdani and that “Arabic numerals,” are already well integrated in our society as they are the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. 

In the episode “South Carolina,” Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons) is running for office and doing very poorly in the polls. He decides to take aim at “Muslim math” as a way to stoke support from racist voters, and to discredit the polling data that has him ranked in sixth place. Back when the episode aired in April 2019, it preceded  a poll that would be published just two months later. In a nationwide survey, more than 50 percent of Americans said that “Arabic numerals” should not be taught in school. 

“South Carolina” admittedly took a blunter approach. During a campaign speech meltdown, Jonah Ryan exclaimed, “Math was invented by Muslims, yeah and we teach this Islamic math to children. These math teachers are terrorists. Algebra? more like al Jazeera.” It's a hyperbolic statement but not one at all disconnected from our reality.

Season 6, Episode 9, “A Woman First”

After former Vice President Kamala Harris’ failed bid to become president in 2024, the VP (or, you know, Veep) wrote a book titled 107 Days. The book was published in September 2025, and it contained a number of stories about her ultra-short bid to beat Donald Trump. It was also Harris’ opportunity to start floating the idea that she would run for the president again in 2028, after she goes on a “listening tour” across the United States to reconnect with the American people. 

As one person wrote on X when the book was announced in July, “Isn’t writing a book after losing, going on a cross country tour, then running for president again exactly what Selina Meyer did in Veep?” 

Yeah, it is. “A Woman First” originally aired in June 2017. In that episode, Selina Meyer (Julia Louise Dreyfus) receives the first copies of her book, A Woman First, First Woman. The book details Meyer's short-lived time as president, and is part of her larger ploy to run for office again. It’s not even the first time Meyer publishes a book in the hopes it assists her in a presidential bid. Some New Beginnings: Our Next American Journey was the first book Meyer wrote. In Season 3, Episode 1, “Some New Beginnings,” Meyer planned an entire Iowa-centric book tour for the autobiography in order to pick up caucus voters in the state.

Season 1, Episode 7, “Full Disclosure”

A few years after the release of Veep’s “Full Disclosure” episode in June 2012, the Hilary Clinton email scandal emerged leading up to the 2016 presidential election. It was the first time Veep started to get serious “predicting the future” coverage. In the episode, Meyer is pressed by the White House to release all of her email correspondence regarding the firing of a secret agent who smiled at her the wrong way. 

In order to accomodate the request but also protect the various backdoor dealings and petty squabbles Meyer's embroiled in, she instructs her team to do a “partial disclosure,” of her emails to get critics off her back. This, like virtually everything else, doesn’t work out for Meyer. 

And while Veep certainly had an eerily apt rendering of Clinton’s scandal just four years later, it would not be the last time “Full Disclosure,” was prescient. Today there is an ongoing battle to release the entirety of the investigative files related to the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case. Already, more than 2,000 emails have been released. They contain the names and correspondence of many high profile and powerful people in the U.S. who sought counsel from a man who had already been convicted for soliciting prostitution of a minor in 2008. 

Was Veep a crystal ball? No. But the writers were able to create a show that was sometimes omniscient because they made every character follow their worst instincts. And unfortunately, we live in a world now where there's a bunch of people in power doing the same thing.