The Simpsons did not ‘predict’ President Trump – this has been 30 years in the making The world reacted with shock this morning as Donald Trump was elected US President. Despite the pollsters’ confident predictions of […]

The world reacted with shock this morning as Donald Trump was elected US President.

Despite the pollsters’ confident predictions of a Hillary Clinton victory, the billionaire tycoon defied the odds, just as he has at every step of his extraordinary campaign.

A common view is that Trump has only expressed the slightest hint of political ambition in recent years.

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“Hillary spent 40 years of her life building her career to lose the presidency to a man who picked up politics as a hobby last year” wrote one person on Twitter.

But it’s possible to trace the tremors of this political earthquake back much farther than his confirmation as the presumptive Republican nominee in May.

“I’m not running for president, but if I did… I’d win. There, I said it. I didn’t think I would, but I did.” Donald Trump, 1987

Following today’s news, many have pointed to the eerily prescient Simpsons episode, “Bart to the Future”, which predicted a Trump Presidency in 2000.

Lisa Simpson is depicted as the US president in 2020, having taken over from “President Trump”, who has left the country “broke”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxjM1yCcqTQ

“It was a warning to America,” writer Dan Greaney told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year, adding: “And that just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane.”

This Simpsons episode didn’t come out of nowhere though.

The early signs

Trump himself was openly stating his political ambitions as far back as 1987 – even if no-one was taking him seriously.

In a cover feature for Newsweek, the 41-year old Trump, who had just published his best-selling book The Art of the Deal, bragged about his potential appeal to voters.

“I’m not running for president, but if I did… I’d win. There, I said it. I didn’t think I would, but I did.”

‘I would never want to rule it out’

The following year Trump reiterated this stance in an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Asked by the talk show host if he’d ever run for the presidency, he said “probably not”, but added:

“If it got so bad, I would never want to rule it out totally, because I really am tired of seeing what’s happening with this country. We’re really making other people live like kings, and we’re not.”

In 1999 Trump gave a typically frank interview on Larry King Live in which he hinted at his White House ambitions more seriously.

“I am going to form a presidential exploratory committee, I might as well announce that on your show, everyone else does, but I’ll be forming that and effective, I believe, tomorrow. And we’ll see. I mean, we’re going to take a very good, strong look at it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peBa3SU46Qs

The interview is also interesting for Trump’s comments on his political leanings at the time, suggesting that he was set to quit the Republican Party:

“I’m a registered Republican. I’m a pretty conservative guy. I’m somewhat liberal on social issues, especially health care, etc, but I’d be leaving another party, and I’ve been close to that party.”

At the time, the Reform Party was still a credible force in the US, and Trump praised its founder Ross Perot while criticising the man who would eventually gain the 2000 candidacy for the party, Pat Buchanan.

In the end the tycoon’s comments proved to be just talk, and he withdrew from the race. Buchanan would go on to win just 0.4% of the vote in 2000 and the Reform Party would later collapse completely.

But this was of course just the beginning of Trump’s long road to the Oval Office, and eventually it didn’t matter which party he belonged to.

Ruby Wax’s encounter with Trump

In a talk to promote her book A Mindfulness Guide For The Frazzled last year, the US comedian revealed that Trump had stated his ambition to run for office when she interviewed him on board his private jet in 2001, for the BBC show Ruby Wax’s American Pie.

“I mean I interviewed this guy about 15 years ago and I got on his plane, about 33,000 ft up and he told me then that he was thinking about becoming the President of the United States and I started laughing and so he landed the plane.”

When the interview resumed, Wax pressed Trump on the issue, and he said that he’d save the taxpayer money because he could use his own jet instead of Air Force One.

Even though the show was broadcast at the time, and the interview is still available on YouTube, it wasn’t covered widely as a news story.

Perhaps because it was presented as comedy – and Trump was still not taken seriously.

He would again express his presidential ambitions throughout the 2000s, but was only taken seriously by the media in the past 12 months as his campaign gained steam.

But beware this false meme…

However, one early political quote attributed to Trump that continues to do the rounds has been debunked as false.

This People Magazine interview never happened. The image used in this widely shared meme is actually taken from the aforementioned interview Trump did with Oprah Winfrey a decade earlier.

When the quote started to go viral People Magazine searched their archives but could not find any evidence of this article.

“We combed through every Trump story in our archive,” a People spokesperson said. “We couldn’t find anything remotely like this quote — and no interview at all in 1998.”