By Mandy Taheri
Reporter
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
Comedy writer Dan Greaney, best known for his work on The Simpsons, announced Tuesday that he is running for president in 2028 as a "progressive Republican."
Greaney, who wrote a 2000 episode of The Simpsons that predicted a future Donald Trump presidency**,** appeared in an Instagram video dressed in a robe, gray beard and wig to announce that “Judgment Day is here” as he launched his presidential bid.
“I’m just a self-proclaimed prophet…” he says in an Instagram video before announcing his candidacy, adding, “who went to law school, graduated, passed the bar.” He then takes off his “prophet” costume and says, “Screw it, I can be a politician.”
Read More on Politics
“I’m running for president. My platform: America for all. Let’s do this,” he said. Greaney is among the early figures to publicly launch a 2028 presidential bid, more than two years before the next presidential election. On the Republican side, figures frequently discussed as potential contenders include Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, among others. California Governor Gavin Newsom is considered a potential pick for the Democratic nomination.
Newsweek has reached out to Greaney’s press team for comment via email on Tuesday.
Who Is Dan Greaney?
Greaney, a graduate of Harvard University and its law school, is a longtime comedy writer best known for his work on The Simpsons, The Office and Borat, among other projects.
According to the 60-year-old’s LinkedIn profile, he worked as an attorney at Proskauer, Rose, Goetz & Mendelsohn for almost three years before working on The Simpsons, where he was a writer from Season 7 to 11. He is the co-founder of Bailiwik, an online community platform. He currently lives in California.
In his Tuesday video announcement, Greaney says the current crisis facing the U.S. is “political, historic, and beyond that it is moral.” He goes on to then take aim at both sides of the aisle, calling out Trump, Vance, along with “the billionaires, careerists and cowards in both parties, have turned their backs on it,” in reference to the founding governing ideal that “all men are created equal.”
On his campaign website, he writes, “The Republican establishment empowered Trump, the Democrats failed to stand up to him or for us, so I'm not leaving it in their hands.”
...
What Is Greaney's Presidential Platform?
Greaney identifies as a “progressive Republican,” a term he uses in his Instagram bio, which states, “Predicted Trump presidency on The Simpsons, now running for president as a progressive Republican.”
The two major categories of his platform are “restoring democracy” and “rebuilding America.”
Greaney said his platform for “restoring democracy” includes expanding the Supreme Court from nine to 13 justices, strengthening the rule of law and reducing the influence of money in politics through transparency legislation and a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The 2010 decision said corporations and labor unions have a First Amendment right to unlimited independent political spending.
His broader agenda also calls for universal health care, a Green New Deal initiative and measures aimed at improving housing affordability.
According to FEC data, Greaney filed his candidacy on April 19.
What Was the 'Prophet' Episode of 'The Simpsons'?
The Simpsons, created by Matt Groening, premiered in 1989 and has aired more than 800 episodes across more than three decades, making it the longest-running primetime scripted series in U.S. television history.
The show has also gained a reputation online for seemingly predicting future events, including a Trump presidency, Disney’s acquisition of Fox and, according to some fans, elements resembling the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2024 assassination attempt against Trump.
...
In Season 11, Episode 17, "Bart to the Future," Bart Simpson has a vision of the future in which his sister, Lisa, is the president of the United States. She tells her staff at one point: “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.”
Trump did launch a short-lived presidential campaign in the 2000 election, running as a Reform Party candidate. He officially ended the campaign on February 14 of that year. The episode of The Simpsons predicting his presidency originally aired about a month later, on March 19.
“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,” Greaney told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016 of the episode. “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 told the outlet that making Trump president "just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane.”
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines