The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” final season premiere pulled no punches when it came to Donald Trump, ending with a fully-blown dig at the four-times-indicted former president.
The final minutes of the “Atlanta” episode saw Larry David’s eponymous character arrested for giving water to a friend who was waiting in line, on a swelteringly hot day, to vote. David’s kindhearted gesture violated Georgia’s state law that bans the handing out of food and water to voters waiting in line.
After being carted away by the cops, David’s mug shot appeared on screen.
His scowl bore a striking resemblance to the photo that was taken of Trump following his arrest last August over alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia. Republican 2024 front-runner Trump has since reportedly raised millions of dollars from putting the snap on campaign merchandise.
Jeff Schaffer, the executive producer of “Curb,” said David’s spoof mug shot moment was actually created well after filming on the season had wrapped.
“We were always going to Atlanta because of that barbaric law that you can’t give anybody water or food when they’re in line for voting. When we were talking about stories, Larry said, ‘This law is insane. I think it’d be funny if I got arrested for that,’” Schaffer told The Wrap in an interview published Sunday.
“This is crazy. You’re in Atlanta, he’s in Atlanta, you just got arrested. Let’s do this! We had to wait until the strike was over to even be able to shoot Larry looking like our former Oompa Loompa. So it came completely afterwards,” Schaffer remembered telling David.
“It was honestly a byproduct of us having to wait around during the strike,” he added. “It was perfect and now it looks like the whole thing was because of that and that was the last thing that happened.”
It’s not the first time the HBO show has mocked Trump.
In the first episode of the show’s 10th season, which aired in January 2020, the cantankerous David repeatedly wore one of Trump’s signature red “Make America Great Again” caps — but only after realizing it was a “people repellent” and therefore an excellent way of not having to talk to people he didn’t want to.
Trump, in February 2020, bizarrely shared one scene from that episode on X, then known as Twitter, in which David dons the cap to defuse tensions with an angry biker he’d just cut up on the road.
“TOUGH GUYS FOR TRUMP!” the then-president captioned the video, apparently unaware it was mocking him and his MAGA movement.
“What in God’s name was that?” David later told The New York Times about Trump’s post. “That was crazy, crazy. I don’t understand it. I still don’t get it.”
Schaffer at the time agreed.
“This guy is so stupid, he doesn’t realize we’re making fun of him,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s so funny — when we were shooting it, someone on set was like, ‘When this comes out, he’s definitely going to tweet about this.’ And I said, ‘No, that’s crazy.’ And then he did, and he pinned it at the top of his feed, and it just stayed up there.”
“Larry and I talked about it, like, is there a response we do? But we decided to just let that orange-haired baby sit in his own messy diaper,” he added.