In Season 11, Episode 17 of The Simpsons, ‘Bart to the Future’, a grown-up Lisa Simpson, now President of the United States, groans about the state of the economy. ‘As you know’, she says to her aides, ‘we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.’ The episode aired in 2000, so naturally, when Trump was elected president in 2016, there was much fanfare. ‘If predicting Trump’s rise in 2015 was tough’, Rolling Stone enthused, ‘imagine doing it in 2000.’ A meme was born, and before all the votes from the election had even been tallied, journalists the world over were bingeing hours of old episodes to produce listicles of ‘Times The Simpsons Predicted the Future’.

The meme reached its apotheosis in 2021, with the publication of The Simpsons Secret: A Cromulent Guide to How The Simpsons Predicted Everything! by Linda Poulteney and James Hicks. ‘Did The Simpsons really, truly predict anything?’, Bill Oakley, a Simpson’s writer, asks on its blurb. ‘I predict you’ll have to purchase this book to get the true story.’

I haven’t purchased the book, but I can already answer Oakley’s question with ‘No’. It did not bode well that the joke that set the entire ‘Simpsons predictions’ meme into motion was not some extraordinary premonition, but rather entirely topical for the moment in which it was written. It is a mark of excellent satire that it should seem, in retrospect, to be prophetic, and that it should outlive the forgetting of whatever cultural ‘moment’ gave rise to it in the first place. But jokes about a ‘Trump presidency’ in 2000 didn’t come out of left field, for the simple reason that Trump in 2000 was a candidate for the presidency. He didn’t just coyly flirt with running, the way he had done in 1988 and was to do in 2012 (and, perhaps, will again in 2028). The 2000 run was real: he had an exploratory committee, went on the campaign trail, and even dumped his girlfriend, a young Slovenian model named Melania Knauss, because – according to some sources, anyway – he feared that a nude photoshoot of her on his plane would ruffle some feathers and damage his chances.

Trump was campaigning for the nomination of the Reform Party, originally the vehicle for the political ambitions of Ross Perot, but which also controlled Minnesota under the governorship of ex-pro-wrestler Jesse Ventura. The party was much too small for two big personalities, and cracks were starting to show. Trump was reeled in as the Ventura candidate. The Perot faction was in disarray, and the vacuum risked being filled by the palaeoconservative pundit Pat Buchanan. It is now conventional to trace a line from the Buchanan of the 1990s to the Trump we know today. But the Trump we know today also, surprisingly enough, had a lot in common with the Trump of 2000.

The ghostwritten book that accompanied Trump’s 2000 campaign, The America We Deserve, has a marked anti-establishment bent, auguring in a new millennium belonging to the ‘non-politician’. Trump rails against the ‘burons’ (‘a cross between a bureaucrat and a moron’), who are ‘guilty of what I call Dreamicide’; it’s a shame ‘buron’ and ‘Dreamicide’ didn’t follow ‘many such cases’, ‘sad!’, ‘a lot of people are saying’, et cetera into the English lexicon. According to the Trump of The America We Deserve, illegal immigrants should be deported and even legal immigrants ‘should not enter easily… we must take care of our own people first’. Israel is the ‘“unsinkable aircraft carrier” for America’s interests and values’. Trump’s biggest shifts since 2000 have been on universal healthcare and abortion, but one still gets the sense that his heart isn’t in either, that this is red meat for the GOP old guard.

What really gets Trump’s motor running is, and always has been, trade. For him the balance of trade is a question of honour: America is ‘ripped off by virtually every country we do business with’, he (ghost)wrote in 2000. As early as 1988, he was ‘tired of seeing the country get ripped off’, and especially tired of America’s trade deficit with Japan; so much of Trump’s worldview can be traced back to the financial anxieties of the 1980s. All this is to say that Trump is not, and never has been, particularly unpredictable, at least on the big issues. He has stayed in the same place, and the world has changed around him.

In the nine years that have passed since the appearance of Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance has fundamentally pivoted in a way that Trump never has. Hillbilly Elegy was a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of book, its central argument being that Vance’s peers in the slums of white America had their own habits, their own workshy culture, to blame. Somehow this was largely missed by many people who claimed to have read it; and all of a sudden, ‘explanations’ of Trump’s victory and (still more fancifully) of Brexit, both of which were assumed to be the screams of the ‘Left Behind’, were retrofitted into the book itself. Yet when Vance, in an oft-cited remark, described Trump as ‘cultural heroin’, that word was not plucked from thin air: the point was that Trump, like an opioid, would provide Vance’s self-destructive, dysfunctional ‘hillbillies’ with yet more ways of making their own lives worse.

Vance now finds himself Trump’s attack-dog. More than that, he has cultivated an image as the intellectual spokesman of ‘MAGA’, thumping his chest for the entire political outlook (of protectionism and other types of government intervention) that Hillbilly Elegy was written against. In both these functions, he has the zeal of the late convert, or, as we might just as well call it, the zeal of personal insecurity, of having something to prove. Gladstone once said of Lord Palmerston that, although he had ‘the power to stir up angry passions… he chose, like the sea-god in the Æneid, rather to pacify’. Nobody could say with a straight face that Trump chooses ‘rather to pacify’; but nor would anyone deny that he really does have the power and the will to make the weather. Vance, however, is very much a mortal, bobbing helplessly upon stormy seas whipped up by his master.