'Veep' creator's Trump mockery project hits major snag: 'Better lawyer up'

Armando Iannucci, the Scottish writer and producer behind the hit HBO series "Veep," is working on a project that takes on President Donald Trump — but there's a snag, Deadline reported on Tuesday: potential backers of the project fear becoming targets of MAGA hate.

Iannucci confessed as much at a Creative U.K. event in Liverpool, the article stated, as he "revealed that he was developing a screen project based on Trump’s speeches, but was warned that he would not be able to pull together finance in America."

“I got a lot of, ‘Yeah, you wouldn’t get the money for that at the moment, I’m afraid.’ So I said, ‘Why not?’ [They replied] ‘Well, you know, if you want what comes with it…'” said Iannucci. “[I’ve been] talking to journalists out there who say, ‘If you’re on the list, your life is made miserable.’" What they told him, he said, was "the inland revenue will come calling, you better lawyer up, you will spend the next four years just weighed down by legal issues you have to get through.”

Trump has spent much of his career, even before the presidency, suing media outlets that report on him unfavorably and has demanded America "open up" libel laws to make speech-retaliation suits easier to do.

Beyond that, Trump supporters have pushed for boycotts of any company that is not just perceived as anti-Trump, but also too culturally liberal, famously spooking Bud Light's parent company with a huge loss of sales over their partnership with a transgender influencer. Far-right legal strategist Leonard Leo reportedly had a hand in driving the action, although in recent months Trump has fallen out with Leo.

The president has also successfully cowed a number of media and tech companies into settling with him, with one of the most controversial being a CBS settlement over Trump's suit for supposedly deceiving the public by editing former Vice President Kamala Harris' "60 Minutes" interview — litigation experts broadly dismissed as frivolous, but that CBS reportedly wanted to resolve amicably to expedite the Trump administration's approval of their merger.