Joe Biden’s fundraiser on Thursday featured an entertainment figure he’s long interacted with in tweets, cameos and a parody video: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played his fictional counterpart on the HBO series Veep.
Talking to 655 donors and supporters at the virtual event, Louis-Dreyfus slammed President Donald Trump for a dismal environmental record.
According to a pool report, Louis-Dreyfus said that for the pilot episode of Veep, they “tried to think of the stupidest, weakest environmental gesture that my idiot character could possibly make, so that she wouldn’t offend the fossil fuel industry.” Their answer: a program to have plastic cutlery in the Capitol replaced with recyclable utensils.
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“But that’s actually more than Trump has done for the environment in four years,” she said. “Talk about pathetic, he’s actually worse than a fictional president with a team of professional writers working 24/7 to make her as bad as possible.”
Her character, Selina Meyer, was Vice President but ascended to the Oval Office when the president resigned.
She also reacted to Biden’s appearance on Late, Late Show with James Corden, in which the presumptive Democratic nominee quipped that he would pick Louis-Dreyfus as his running mate.
“I was of course flattered,” she said. “But then I realized, this is America. We can’t make a totally unqualified, ill-equipped TV personality vice president. No, no, in this country we make him president.”
In his remarks, Biden warned the donors that Trump would try to “indirectly steal” the election “by arguing that mail-in ballots don’t work. They’re not real. They’re not fair.”
Trump also has left open the question of whether he will accept the results of the election. In an interview that aired on Fox News Sunday this week, he told Chris Wallace, “It depends. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I really do.”
Louis-Dreyfus, who has been active in environmental causes, was also joined at the event by Gina McCarthy, the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council and former EPA administrator.