The man who once put a Trump presidency into a Simpsons script now wants to take on the real thing.
Dan Greaney, the Emmy-winning comedy writer best known for the 2000 episode “Bart to the Future” — in which a grown-up Lisa Simpson inherits the wreckage of a then-fictional Trump administration — announced Tuesday, May 26, that he is running for president in 2028. The Los Angeles-based writer, who calls himself “the prophet,” made the half-serious announcement in an Instagram video, casting himself as a “progressive Republican” in the mold of former Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.
The 61-year-old begins the clip clad in a Nostradamus-esque gray beard and robe before yanking off the costume to reveal a suit and a clean-shaven face. The pivot is the joke and the thesis: a self-styled seer who happens, inconveniently for the bit, to be a Harvard-educated lawyer.
“I’m just a self-proclaimed prophet… who went to law school, graduated, passed the bar. Wait! I am a lawyer!” he says in the video shared exclusively before his announcement spread. “Screw it, I can be a politician. I’m running for president. My platform: America for all. Let’s do this.”
From Springfield to the Stump
Greaney’s pitch is rooted in a writing credit that has haunted American politics for more than a decade. “Bart to the Future,” which aired as Season 11, Episode 17 of The Simpsons, depicted President Lisa Simpson cleaning up the financial mess left by a Trump White House — a throwaway gag in 2000 that calcified into internet folklore after Trump’s 2016 victory. The show, created by Matt Groening in 1989, has aired more than 800 episodes and stands as the longest-running primetime scripted series in U.S. television history, with online speculation about its supposed predictions — from the Sept. 11 attacks in a 1997 episode to Disney’s 2019 acquisition of 21st Century Fox, foreshadowed in 1998 — fueling a cottage industry of conspiracy threads.
Greaney has leaned into the mythology. In a video posted in June 2025, he predicted President Trump would be removed from office “by the end of the year.” That didn’t happen. In a post shared Monday, he acknowledged the missed call and pivoted.
“Our crisis is bigger than Trump and Vance and the billionaires and the Republican party,” he wrote. “Spineless Democrats refuse to stand up for us even when they had the chance.”
A Resume Beyond the Writers’ Room
Greaney is not a typical celebrity dabbler. A graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School, he worked as an attorney at Proskauer Rose for almost three years before pivoting to comedy. He wrote for The Simpsons from seasons seven through 11 and later worked on The Office and Borat. He is also the co-founder of Bailiwik, an online community platform, and currently lives in California. He describes himself as an “occasional Republican voter.”
His campaign platform is organized around two broad themes: “restoring democracy” and “rebuilding America.” The first bucket includes expanding the Supreme Court from nine to 13 justices, strengthening the rule of law, reducing the influence of money in politics through transparency legislation, and a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 ruling that opened the floodgates to corporate political spending. The second includes universal healthcare, a Green New Deal and measures aimed at improving housing affordability.
Targeting Both Parties
The announcement video opens not with policy but with a broadside. “Trump, Vance, the billionaires, careerists, and cowards in both parties have turned their backs on [the United States],” Greaney says. “It’s money, power, and security for them, but not for you.”
He says the government must work for all people, and that he’d love to help — “but I’m not a lawyer,” he deadpans, before remembering that he is. The framing is comedic, but Greaney has insisted his campaign is an attempt to bridge entrenched divisions and to speak to a broader sense of shared national purpose. On his campaign website, he writes that “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.”
An Early Entry to a Crowded Horizon
Greaney is among the earliest figures to formally enter the 2028 race, more than two years before voters head to the polls. On the Republican side, Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are routinely floated as top contenders. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is widely considered a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.
Whether Greaney’s “progressive Republican” lane — a label that hasn’t carried much weight inside the GOP since the Roosevelt era — can find purchase in a polarized primary system is another question entirely. Even Greaney concedes the operation is running on what he has called “quite a budget crunch.”
Still, the writer who once predicted a Trump presidency for a gag is now wagering that the joke can become the platform. “Judgment Day is here,” he declared on April 19, the day he first teased the run. A month later, the costume came off.