How Did They Do It? The Simpsons Predicted the Outcome of the U.S. Election

The+Electoral+College%2C+2016

The Electoral College, 2016

Ben Bloomberg and Ben Bloomberg

Election season is over, and it was a crazy one. It’s been more than a month now since Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. Most people did not expect this outcome based off all the pre-election polls and they were shocked to see the former businessman become the President-elect. However, one TV show saw it coming long before 2016.

On March 19, 2000, episode 243 of The Simpsons titled “Bart to the Future” was released. In this episode, 10-year-old Bart Simpson is shown a vision of his future life 30 years later. In this vision, Bart is a washed-up 40 year old with no hope and an unsuccessful life. However, his sister Lisa Simpson is the President of the United States. But this is the astonishing part: her predecessor was none other than Donald Trump.

Wow, that’s a pretty bold prediction: using Trump as the President for comedic and ironic effects, only to be right 16 years later. At the time, Trump briefly ran for President as a Reform Party candidate and eventually dropped out, so The Simpsons used Trump to show a ridiculous situation in which he became President. But the described ridiculousness by The Simpsons became reality.

At the time of this episode, the writer of it, Dan Greaney, described his thought of a Trump presidency as, “the logical last stop before hitting bottom. It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane.” That’s pretty ironic: this joke from a TV show actually occurred in real life.

The Simpsons have astonishingly predicted other things as well. For example, in a 1995 episode that took place in the future, a Rolling Stones 2010 tour poster was featured by Lisa Simpson’s bed. This is very significant because though The Rolling Stones didn’t have a tour in 2010, they had one in 2012-13 and have had four more since. The Rolling Stones have now been performing for over 50 years, making it a remarkable feat for The Simpsons to have seen this one coming. As well as this, The Simpsons predicted that Roy, from the famous performing duo Siegfried and Roy, would get attacked and badly injured during a show by one of their tigers, and much more.

How did these things happen? It is most likely that this is just a very large coincidence, but one can’t deny how incredible these predictions are. Even though these predictions probably required lots of luck, it is amazing that these things actually occurred in real life. At the times of these episodes, little people could’ve reasonably predicted that Donald Trump would become President, that The Rolling Stones would still be touring, or that Roy would get attacked by one of his tigers during a show.

There are so many connections that people have had in the real world to this show. People have even said that The Simpsons connect back to the origins of the iPod, video chat on phones, and the smartwatch. Lots of this is farfetched, but there is a range of how people view all of the things The Simpsons are said to have predicted. People can think that The Simpsons have supernatural predicting powers, that they just got lucky with these, or that they even have inspired these events. However The Simpsons did it, they somehow saw these things coming, and that’s quite perplexing.