Was it always an inevitability?
On March 19, 2000, “The Simpsons” aired an episode that took a peek into the future.
Titled “Bart to the Future,” the episode shows Bart a vision of what his adult life will be like. In the episode, Bart hasn’t amounted to much, and is still asking Homer for money, and begging his sister for a job. But it’s the second part that’s important.
Lisa has become the first straight female president of the United States, but she inherited a country in dire straights from the previous administration.
“As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump,” Lisa says to her staff.
“It was a warning to America,” Dan Greaney, a writer for “The Simpsons” who wrote the episode in question, told The Hollywood Reporter. “And that just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane.”
The episode aired four years before Donald Trump debuted his reality TV show “The Apprentice.”
“The important thing is that Lisa comes into the presidency when America is on the ropes and that is the condition left by the Trump presidency,” Greaney tells THR. “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.”
Since Trump announced he was forming an exploratory committee, the episode has formed a new popularity, with fans excited at how far out the writers were able to predict the future
“I am tickled we are getting all this attention, but I don’t think it’s going to trigger this well-awaited re-evaluation of my episode that I was hoping for,” he says, laughing. “The Simpsons has always kind of embraced the over the top side of American culture … and (Trump) is just the fulfillment of that.”
Last year, “The Simpsons” aired a short featuring Trump again, but this time he got his own animated caricature.
