D'Oh! 'The Simpsons' Predicted a Trump Presidency in 2000 as 'A Warning to America' (VIDEO)
Nearly 16 years ago to the day, "The Simpsons" episode “Bart to the Future” predicted a Trump presidency in what episode writer Dan Greaney told the Hollywood Reporter was “a warning to America.”
Here's the blink-and-you-miss-it line spoken by Lisa Simpson, who is the first “straight female” president of the United States in this worst-case alternate future: “As you know, we've inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.”
The uncanny prescience is made even more remarkable considering the fact that, as Hollywood Reporter pointed out, Donald Trump's reality show "The Apprentice" was still four years away from hitting TV screens when the Simpsons episode aired.
Greaney explained the reason behind the line: “What we needed was for Lisa to have problems that were beyond her fixing, that everything went as bad as it possibly could, and that's why we had Trump be president before her.”
As Cracked.com noted in a February article, “6 Ugly Things You Learn About Donald Trump Reading His Books,” Trump has been testing the waters and fine-tuning his presidential bid with different books, rhetoric and strategies several times before. This time, we've hit the low captured by “Bart to the Future.”
That prediction of rock-bottom American politics is manifested not only in a Trump presidency, but in one other unexpected way. Lisa, ever the feminist truth-speaker swimming upstream when she takes up a cause in the show's long history, stands in for what Hillary Clinton's presidency might look like judging from her campaign.
Bart begs her to help him and to let him be “co-president,” which she says is “crazy.” Earlier this week, Chris Matthews provided a hot take that Clinton should smile more or pick GOP presidential hopeful John Kasich as her running mate. Not exactly as bad as the prankster Bart as second-in-command, but this true-life sexist story exposes certain sectors of America's discomfort with a strong female president.
But just as the episode's spoofed namesake, "Back to the Future," was lauded as having predicted (in a near-miss) the 2015 Cubs' World Series win and hoverboard technology, this coincidence is one we gleefully jump onto.
Let us hope it doesn't come to this, and that enough crossover between Simpsons fans and Trump supporters could start moving the needle in the right direction.
Watch: The line about Trump's presidency occurs at 2:21.
