The animated sitcom The Simpsons has a knack for drumming up headlines now and then for its uncanny ways of cheekily predicting the future. The recent 2024 US elections also dug up some familiar parallels that had the potential to eerily match with the present reality.
Yeardley Smith, who has now voiced Lisa Simpson, Homer and Marge Simpson’s daughter, for 36 seasons, couldn’t stop gushing about a particular prediction that came true, not once but twice. What prediction was this, you may ask? It was an outcome that recently again flipped the table on the political side of things – “Trump as President.”
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During an exclusive chat with The New York Post at Vulture Fest, Smith didn’t hold back when it came to outing her unfiltered thoughts on the issue. “I do know the story was that they were — as ‘The Simpsons’ do — like, who would be the most ridiculous President ever? Whether or not you voted for him, that was the thinking,” she said of Donald Trump.
The Simpsons voice star affirmed that their long-running show predicted the mind-boggling development at a time when the Republican leader possibly wasn’t even thinking about politics. Per Smith’s confession, Trump was still very much associated with his reality TV roots through The Apprentice.
{{/usCountry}}The Simpsons voice star affirmed that their long-running show predicted the mind-boggling development at a time when the Republican leader possibly wasn’t even thinking about politics. Per Smith’s confession, Trump was still very much associated with his reality TV roots through The Apprentice.
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“President Trump” era became a reality twice
A quick brushing up of the Fox sitcom will remind fans that the “Bart to the Future” episode in 2000 jumped forward into the future to a time when Lisa Simpson is portrayed as the POTUS. “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump,” she’s heard telling her staff. Secretary of State Milhouse Van Houten eventually reveals that despite its original superpower status, the country has run its financially rich identity into the ground.
While it remains unclear what exactly the future would look like when Trump takes his seat at the White House after his inauguration, the MAGA boss was also elected in 2016. Although Van Houte’s vision of America going broke didn’t translate into the real world, a subsequent stock market crisis and the foreboding COVID-19 pandemic came much closer to that end.