While South Park has spent much of the season poking fun at a potential Donald Trump presidency via a Mr. Garrison plotline featuring an egregious fake tan, it turns out another animated comedy may have beat them to the punchline. If you can remember back to an episode that aired years and years ago, you may remember that The Simpsons once predicted a Donald Trump presidency, and we have the video evidence.
Back in 2000, which also happened to be an election year, The Simpsons aired an episode of the hit series that was election based. Called "Bart to the Future," the episode focused on Bart and his family going on a trip that led to Bart sneaking into a Native American Casino. While there, the manager of the casino showed him a vision of the future that included Lisa Simpson becoming President of the United States. So what does this have to do with Donald Trump? After speaking to the public about the platforms in her presidency, Lisa mets with her advisors, where she revealed they had "inherited quite a budget crunch" from the former president: Donald Trump. She then spent time trying to figure out how to crunch the numbers and make them work.
This isn't the first time The Simpsons has inadvertently been prescient regarding world events. Recently, we saw The Simpsons correctly predict the Nobel Prize winner in Economic Sciences, a prize that went to Bengt Holmström. The show also correctly predicted that a new Star Wars movie would face off against an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie in the future, which happened last winter. The show has been practically prophetic on numerous other occasions, and you can take a look at more examples here.
There's the famous catchphrase that "the Simpsons already did it" and while that phrase relates more to jokes that get run on other comedy series, it definitely applies to these predictions, too. I guess we should stop being shocked that The Simpsons is able to pull these references together that become relevant later, but it's just too good not to take notice of them when they do happen.
Last night featured a tight race between Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. By now, we already know the outcome came up with Clinton short in the Electoral College, giving Trump the ultimate win. We can't say The Simpsons didn't see it coming, because the show did. Now let's just hope that the budget crunch part of Lisa's prediction doesn't end up being quite so prophetic.
New episodes of The Simpsons air on Sunday night at 8 p.m. ET. To check out the rest of the network's upcoming winter schedule, head here.
