- Episode called Bart to the Future includes vision of the U.S. in 2030
- Lisa Simpsons has just been elected president - to succeed Trump
- Nation's financial ruin due to Trump policies is revealed
- In contrast to his 2016 rhetoric, U.S. is shown taking handouts from China
- Lisa has to institute massive tax hikes in order to dig America out of its hole
- Simpsons has 'predicted' world events before, including Ebola, the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle and the Arab Spring
Donald Trump's bid for the White House and ascendancy in the polls has surprised many - but The Simpsons called it 15 years ago.
The cartoon foretold a Trump presidency in a surreal episode where Bart is given a window into the future - and found a country brought to its knees by financial mismanagement and a crime wave ushered in by The Donald.
In Bart to the Future, first aired in March 2000, a fortune teller gave Bart a glimpse of 2030 - just weeks after Trump vacated the White House.
The episode's alternate universe reveals that Trump, who will be 84 in 2030, left the country in an impossible amount of debt, and reliant on foreign aid from Europe and China.
This sorry state of affairs is the exact opposite of Trump's current campaign promise to 'Make America Great Again', and stop 'losing' to other nations.
The recently-unearthed episode is the latest in a series of eerie Simpsons predictions, in which the show has foreseen the Arab Spring, the Ebola crisis and the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle.
In the episode's vision of the future, America is also at the mercy of an army of genetically-enhanced thugs, brought about by Trump programs designed to help the nation's youth which dramatically backfired.
The only person who can save the shattered United States is none other than the newly-elected President Lisa Simpson.
Despite her lofty ambitions to 'refill the oceans' and build the world's biggest book-mobile, her biggest task becomes rescuing the nation from its crippling debt.
An exchange from Lisa's first cabinet meeting, meeting a balding Millhouse in charge of the nation's finances, starts with a sobering financial summary.
Lisa says: 'As you know, we've inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump. How bad is it, Secretary Van Houten?'
He holds up a graph showing a financial death-plunge and replies: 'We're broke'.
Lisa later asks whether there is any money to fund her campaign pledges - to which another official replies: 'No. We borrowed from every country in the world.'
Lisa is later forced to announce an enormous tax hike in an attempt to right Trump's wrongs, which kills her approval ratings.
It also does nothing to placate the nation's creditors.
But the nation is eventually saved by Bart, a failed musician in the future vision, who uses his well-practiced ability dodging debt repayments to win the United States a reprieve.
As well as its prediction of Trump's presidential ambitions, which he has entertained since at least the 1980s, The Simpsons has given The Donald its signature treatment more recently.
Not long after his controversial campaign launch, where he called Mexican immigrants 'rapists' and 'drug dealers', The Simpsons published a short video featuring Homer and Trump in close quarters.
In the video Homer was slipped $50 by a campaign official to cheer on Trump at the launch, riffing on real-life allegations that The Donald had paid for support.
However, overexcited fans shunted him right behind Trump as he made his way down an escalator - prompting Homer to get sucked inside his much-commented-upon hairdo, where he found other lost souls including Amelia Earhart.
As soon as he was expelled from Trump's hair-vortex, Homer was collared by security guards and dumped back in Springfield.
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