7 Times the 2024 Election Stole the Plot From Our Favorite Pop Culture Hits

This election season has been a fire hose of stranger-than-fiction moments—cats and dogs and bears, oh my! But there have been some moments that are just like fiction, too, in their uncanny conjuring of plotlines and dialogue from movies, novels, and TV shows: JD Vance demonstrating what one might learn at the “soup Nazi” school of food ordering, or Chris Christie effectively trying to make “fetch” happen with his “Donald Duck” nickname. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Life imitates art.”

In Wilde’s essay, a Platonic dialogue titled “The Decay of Lying,” he’s arguing for aestheticism over realism in literature. “If something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts,” he writes, “Art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land.” For our politicians, in language Donald Trump will understand, some free advice from a lover of novels and truth: Worship the facts; make lying fiction again.

Herewith, seven times life has imitated art.

**Selina Meyer: “I’m Gonna Run!”**

Reality: President Joe Biden stepping down from the race, and his vice president, Kamala Harris, stepping up.

Fiction: HBO’s Veep presaged the plotline, when VP Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) gleefully tells her aide that “POTUS…is not gonna run for a second term. I’m gonna run!” Veep’s showrunner David Mandel told VF that while he didn’t see many similarities between Harris and the megalomaniacal Selina, other aspects of this election cycle seemed as though they could have been ripped from the show: “There’s nothing more Selina than trying to disown something that is one hundred percent yours,” Mandel said of Trump’s (failed) attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 (more on that below).

It’s a Human-Eat-Dog-Food World Out There

Reality: Laura Loomer eating dog food.

Fiction: In Paddington 2, Hugh Grant plays an egotistical actor who takes commercial work while dreaming of a time in which his “dog food days are done.” He dons a floppy-eared dog costume and recommends “Harley’s Gourmet Din Dins” before scooping a healthy spoonful into his mouth. Woof, Loomer, woof.

Project 2025

Reality: Terrifyingly draconian policy ideas.

Fiction: With a little help from its friends, the Heritage Foundation put together Project 2025, a game plan for a dystopian future that includes (even further) gutted reproductive rights, widespread deportations, and expanded presidential powers. As any student of AP English Lit would agree, it’s like an eerie rip-off of 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale—though given that many of the Project 2025 backers are also big on book bans, maybe future generations will never know.

Lisa Simpson for President

Reality: Trump’s presidency and Harris’s outfits.

Fiction: The Simpsons is well-known for its “predictions.” (A tuned-in writers room and more than 770 episodes will do that.) A March 2000 episode of the show, “Bart to the Future,” joined that canon when newly elected president Lisa Simpson noted from the Oval Office that, “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.” This summer, the show’s writer-producer Al Jean pointed out an overlooked matchy-matchy moment from Lisa’s presidency: When Harris took the oath of office as VP in 2021, she wore a purple jacket and a pair of pearl earrings and necklace.

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“They’re Eating the Pets”

Reality: Trump declaring that “in Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” forcing ABC’s moderator David Muir to fact-check the baseless rumor about Haitian immigrants in real time.

Fiction: Trump sounded not unlike the elderly bachelor in the first season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, who gravely tells Kimmy, “When we got to Düsseldorf, they made us shoot all the zoo animals…I ate giraffe, and I liked it!” (A note on eating animals: The Humane Society of the United States hasn’t weighed in on the nonissue in Springfield, Ohio, but in 2018 the nonprofit did argue that Trump’s $12 billion agricultural relief package would benefit large-scale players over independent family farmers, including factory farms “that confine thousands of animals in miserable conditions.”)

Meanwhile, back in the Springfield of The Simpsons, the episode “Dog of Death” found Homer Simpson and company mourning the disappearance of the family pooch—who turned out to have run away due to emotional neglect and trained in a dog-fighting ring—while in “Two Dozen and One Greyhounds,” Mr. Burns is discovered to have been turning various local animals into clothes. (This Springfield crossover also produced one very good meme.)

To follow this train to the strange yet factual end of its track, there has been a newsworthy account of a person involved in an ark’s worth of unfortunate animal interactions, but that was from former independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Bears, B Movies…

Reality: Speaking of, on August 5, The New Yorker reported that Kennedy once found a dead bear cub on the side of the road, loaded it into his trunk, showed it to his pals, took some photos with it, and then deposited it in Central Park staged next to a bicycle, as is logical.

Fiction: Let us turn to the 2007 Canadian TV movie Grizzly Rage, where a carful of teens hits and kills a bear cub, whose murderous mother then menaces them for the rest of the film. A stretch? Perhaps. But given that Kennedy dropped out of the race later that month, anyone with an active imagination might liken the NY profile to the bear mom, effectively killing the campaign.

…And Brain Worms Too!

Reality: In 2012, RFK Jr.—animal connoisseur, conspiracy theorist, and Kennedy black sheep—disclosed in a divorce deposition that “a worm…got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” This, he said, contributed to severe memory loss and mental fogginess.

Fiction: In the campy cult classic Brain Damage (1988), a wormy parasite latches on to the protagonist’s brainstem, leaving him muddled, unaware of reality, and self-isolating. Per The New York Times review, the worm “keeps injecting him with a fluid that produces terrific highs and terrible withdrawal symptoms and turns him into a nut case.”

Aliens

Reality: During the September debate between Harris and Trump, the former president said that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison”—a Trumpian translation of Harris’s 2019 pledge to the ACLU to support gender-affirming care for detained migrants.

Fiction: Trump’s wording echoed an ATN ticker tape headline that showed up onscreen in Succession: “Gender fluid illegals may be entering the country ‘twice.’”

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The day after the debate, Sabrina Carpenter performed a set at the VMAs where she made out with, as Them described it, “a particularly femme extraterrestrial background dancer.” Given MTV’s historic alignment with outer space—when the station launched in 1981, its channel identification was an edited version of a video of an Apollo astronaut planting an MTV flag on the moon—we’re going to call this one correspondence rather than causality until proven otherwise.

“Concepts of a Plan”

Reality: In another standout moment from the debate, Trump, man of mystery, shared with viewers that when it came to health care, he had “concepts of a plan,” but declined to illuminate what those concepts might be. Wise.

Fiction: As Will Arnett’s character in The Office shared during his interview for the top spot at Dunder Mifflin, “I can’t just hand you my plan. If you guys give me the job, then you’ll get the plan.”