“As you know, we’ve inherited quite the budget from President Trump,” newly elected U.S. President Lisa Simpson said in the episode.

Image courtesy of screen capture
“The Simpsons” television show, which in its 35 years of existence has been described as “foretelling” several major world events, predicted the presidency of Kamala Harris, according to many internet users:

The claim in this TikTok video, which accumulated 4.5 million views, 279,500 reactions, 10,200 comments and 80,000 shares as of this writing, appeared on other social platforms, including Reddit, Facebook, or X (archived):

However prescient, an animated show like “The Simpsons” cannot actually predict the future — nor did it ever intend to. For this reason, we have rated this claim “False.”

To ascertain the similarities raised by internet users, we watched “The Simpsons” Episode 17 from Season 11, entitled “Bart to the Future,” which first aired on Fox on March 19, 2000.

In this episode, the Simpsons’ plan to take a vacation by a lake is thwarted, and they must turn around. On their way back, they happen upon a Native American tribal casino where they stop. Bart sneaks in, gets caught and is sent to the office of the casino’s director, who proceeds to tell him his future.

Adult Bart is a musician who is adrift and penniless, looking for any way to find or make money. Meanwhile, his younger sister, Lisa, has recently been elected as the first “straight female” U.S. President, after “President Trump” — a prediction that turned out to be partially accurate, given that Republican Donald Trump was indeed president from 2016 to 2020.

Lisa’s style as president could be construed as similar in style to U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who upon the departure of U.S. President Joe Biden from the 2024 presidential race became the Democratic candidate to the White House against Trump. Like Lisa, if Harris were to become elected, she would become the first “straight female president.”

Unlike Lisa Simpson, however, Harris would not inherit the post directly from Trump, but from Biden. The show’s character as president is facing an unprecedented budget crunch left by Trump — “We’re broke,” her adviser Milhouse Van Houten tells her. Instead, Biden presided over a fast-growing economy that outpaced much of the world after the 2020 pandemic.

While many things were different, viewers could see some resemblance of the episode’s story line to the year 2024 in U.S. politics. Other details in the episode included the “ghost” of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who as of July 2024 was still alive, though he had spent more than a year in hospice care. Another one involved former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s “porn stash” — a pile of adult magazines Bart finds at Camp David — a clear reference to Clinton’s troubled history with women, which included allegations of sexual assault.

Regardless, internet users delighted in the similarities. One of the writers of the episode, Al Jean, posted on X about his pride of having played a part in its creation (archived):

Early in 2024, we reported on so-called “predictions” from “The Simpsons” that turned out to be hoaxes.