“The Simpsons” Writer Who Predicted Trump's Presidency Launches His Own 2028 White House Bid

Meredith KileTue, May 26, 2026 at 8:20 PM UTC

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Dan Greaney; 'The Simpsons' depicting Donald Trump on his golden escalator
Credit: Steve Hankins; Fox -

Dan Greaney, a longtime writer and producer on The Simpsons, has launched a 2028 presidential campaign

Greaney's significant Simpsons contributions include writing the 2000 episode "Bart to the Future," which references a "President Trump," leading many fans to claim the show predicted Donald Trump's political rise

The Emmy-winning writer's newly launched campaign frames him as "progressive Republican in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt"

The Simpsons writer who "predicted" Donald Trump's presidency is making his own run for the White House decades later.

Dan Greaney, a longtime writer and producer on the Emmy-winning animated series, announced his candidacy on Tuesday, May 26, describing himself as "a progressive Republican in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt."

Greaney's campaign announcement video plays up his fame within the Simpsons fandom as the seemingly clairvoyant creative who penned the prescient 2000 episode "Bart to the Future." In the episode, Lisa Simpson is depicted as the first straight female president of the United States in a flash-forward, begrudging the "budget crunch" she's been left by her predecessor, "President Trump."

'The Simpsons' predicted a "President Trump" in the May 2000 episode "Bart to the Future"
Credit: Fox

Dressed in a robe and a wizard's costume wig alluding to how some have called him "The Prophet," Greaney, 61, "predicts" political despair from the current Republican Party.

"Trump, Vance, the billionaires, careerists, and cowards in both parties have turned their backs on [the United States],” he says. “It’s money, power, and security for them, but not for you."

"In America, the government is supposed to work for everyone. Democracy for all, accountability for all, prosperity for all. We must restore this," he continued. "I'd love to help, but I'm not a lawyer. I’m just a self-proclaimed prophet… who went to law school, graduated, passed the bar... Wait! I am a lawyer!”

Greaney then transforms into a clean-cut politician to present his candidacy, which he says is centered on "rejecting the counsels of despair."

"His platform includes restoring democratic norms alongside progressive policies such as universal healthcare and the Green New Deal, unified under the campaign’s central idea of building an America that works for all," reads a press release from Greaney's campaign.

It may surprise some that Greaney is running as a Republican. But the four-time Emmy winner, who has also written for The Office and Borat, admits to "having occasionally voted Republican." His campaign says his candidacy is "an effort to engage Americans across ideological lines, including within the Republican base," as well as "an attempt to bridge entrenched divisions and to speak to a broader sense of shared national purpose."

Greaney concluded his campaign announcement cheekily, with a reference to his infamous reputation: “As to what happens next…we’ll just have to wait and see. You will, at least. I actually do know how it turns out."

Prior to Trump's first election in 2016, Greaney opened up about writing "Bart to the Future" 16 years earlier. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he explained that the storyline was less about predicting the unlikely campaign and subsequent victory, and more of a "warning to America" about its already-spiraling political culture.

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"The important thing is that Lisa comes into the presidency when America is on the ropes. What we needed was for Lisa to have problems that were beyond her fixing, that everything went as bad as it possibly could, and that’s why we had Trump be president before her," he recalled. "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."

Donald Trump appears on 'The Simpsons' in a later episode
Credit: Fox

While he couldn't have foreseen the political future while writing the episode or when the storyline came to fruition, Greaney seemed to be correct in his somewhat apathetic 2016 assessment that the shocking coincidence of "Bart to the Future" would not lead to any widespread political change.

“I am tickled we are getting all this attention, but I don’t think it’s going to trigger this well-awaited reevaluation of my episode that I was hoping for,” he said at the time. “The Simpsons has always kind of embraced the over-the-top side of American culture … and [Trump] is just the fulfillment of that.”

Around the same time, Greaney also spoke withThe Washington Post, offering a bit bleaker of a perspective that may have evolved over the years to fuel his latest political motivations.

Of Trump, Greaney told the Post, "He seems like a Simpsons-esque figure — he fits right in there, in an over-the-top way. But now that he’s running for president, I see that in a much darker way."

"He seemed kind of lovable in the old days, in a blowhard way," the writer continued, adding that he "never" would have predicted Trump's actual campaign and did not believe, as of the interview's May 2016 publication, that the reality star-turned-politician had a chance to win the White House.

He wondered wryly if the brand of counter-culture comedy that The Simpsons has relied on for decades gave rise to the anti-establishment that ultimately spawned the Trump presidency. "I blame the culture of comedy," Greaney said at the time. "We seem to have blown it up."

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Greaney is one of the first to officially declare his candidacy for 2028, especially within the Republican Party, where the presumed frontrunners are members of the current administration.

The top two GOP contenders are thought to be Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the latter of whom placed third in the 2016 GOP presidential primaries that Trump ultimately won.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”