The Simpsons made Donald Trump president 16 years ago as a plot device to make America ‘as bad as it possibly could be’

' It just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom'

An image from a short animation released after Donald Trump announced he would be running for president

On 19 March, 2000, 16 years before Donald Trump was elected president, The Simpsons aired an episode in which Donald Trump is elected president.

‘Bart to the Future’ turned out to be scarily clairvoyant, with Bart seeing a vision of his life in which his sister Lisa is president and forced to pick up the pieces from a Trump presidency.

"As you know, we've inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump," Lisa tells her staff at one point, who inform her the country is broke thanks to his time in office.

But why did the creators choose Trump as her predecessor?

"The important thing is that Lisa comes into the presidency when America is on the ropes, and that is the condition left by the Trump presidency," episode writer Dan Greaney told The Hollywood Reporter back in March, when Trump heading to The White House still looked unlikely.

"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."

More than just a plot device though, Greaney said “it was a warning to America”.

“[It] just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom,” he added. “It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane."

Democrats can at least take solace in the fact that, if The Simpsons continues its incredible run of predicting the future, Trump will eventually be replaced by the first woman president.

Last night, South Park hastily rewrote its latest episode to reflect the shock outcome of the election.