Did The Simpsons predict the Donald Trump presidency? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

A reoccurring rumour online claims that animated TV series The Simpsons accurately predicted the presidency of US President Donald Trump in a year 2000 episode, even as going as far as accurately portraying a visual of Trump riding down an escalator waving at fans.

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Despite the persistent nature of this rumour, it’s not quite as impressive as it first sounds. This is largely down to a very misleading image below that shows side-by-side shots of Trump riding down the escalator along with an apparently identical Simpsons version from – allegedly – 15 years prior.

This image is misleading because of one pertinent fact; the Simpsons images on the left of the meme are not from the year 2000, rather they originated in 2015, the same year Donald Trump really did ride down the escalator. The screenshots are from a Simpsons mini-episode (only 93 seconds long) called Trumptastic Voyage, that was posted to the Animation on FOX YouTube channel on July 15th, after Trump really had rode the escalator in similar fashion after announcing his presidency.

As such, The Simpsons scene was directly inspired by its real life counterpart, and not a “prediction” of anything.

There is some small (albeit less impressive) truth to the rumour, however. In an episode from the year 2000 of The Simpsons titled Bart to the Future, that sees character Lisa become President of the United States in a vision of the future, it is mentioned that she “inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump”.

Coincidence? Yes, but not mightily remarkable since Donald Trump had been publicly toying with the idea of running for President since the 1980s, and only a year prior to the episode airing (in 1999) had told Larry King that his first choice for vice-president would be Oprah Winfrey in yet another discussion about a possible presidential bid.


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As such, any claim a year later that Trump had become president in the future wouldn’t exactly be considering a particularly striking prophecy, and certainly not a sign that The Simpsons creator Matt Groening is some sort of “deep state agent” or supernatural prophet as claimed by some.

A similar hoax claimed that Trump would touch a glowing orb in Saudi Arabia in a 2002 episode, 15 years before he actually did in 2017. However that hoax fell foul to the same false assumption as above. The 2002 episode wasn’t from 2002, it was from 2017, after Trump had actually visited Saudi Arabia.

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