FOX / Simpsons
The world seemed to stop on Saturday evening when news of the failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump broke. Every major network in the United States and many worldwide stopped what they were doing to feature coverage of the incident as details unfolded.
In the UK, Channel 4 reportedly had to scramble to pull an old episode of The Simpsons which featured a similar assassination attempt to the one on Donald Trump‘s life and it’s a great thing they did because had they ran that episode in the immediate aftermath the blowback on that network would have been immeasurable.
The scene shows Lisa Simpson standing on a podium while a sniper takes aim at her, an incident with very obvious visual parallels to the failed assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump:
The episode originally aired on February 18th, 1996. I’m almost 90% certain I watched that episode on a tiny TV in my grandma’s bedroom during a Sunday family dinner. For some reason that I can’t quite explain, this episode sticks out to me.
The plot of the episode is pretty outlandish. Lisa Simpson discovers that Jebediah Springfield, the founder of Springfield, was actually mad murderous pirate Hans Sprungfeld and she tries to tell the town about her discovery. It’s around this time that Lisa Simpson had a gun pointed at her (in the episode) with visual parallels to the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life.
According to the Post, the episode was set to run as part of a Simpsons marathon on July 14th but it was quietly pulled and replaced with ‘Baby You Can’t Drive My Car’ from season 30. It really is hard to imagine what the blowback would have been like had that episode immediately aired in the aftermath of the attempted assassination.
Elsewhere, former President Donald Trump is expected to announce his VP choice today which will certainly be must-see TV for millions after the horrific incident over the weekend.