The Simpsons creator Matt Groening explained why he saw Donald Trump’s rise coming from a mile away.
Groening appeared on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast Monday, where he likened the president to the “television evangelists” that marked his childhood. “One way in which I’m not surprised by Trump is that growing up, watching television evangelists blatantly being crooks and con artists,” Groening said, as he and Maron discussed Fox News’ hold on older audiences. One key issue Groening feels is part of Trump’s “con” is his characterization of the nation’s immigrants.
“Everything that’s true is so narrow and everything is replaced by the next thing, the next thing, the next thing,” Groening explained, indicating the Trump-heavy news cycle. “I think it would change people’s minds who have no empathy for immigrants if they could see” the real people behind the issue, he added, pointing listeners to HBO documentary Which Way Home.
“It just blew my mind,” he said, explaining that Trumpism has created a mindset where “it doesn’t even get acknowledged” that there are “things to be empathetic about.”
Groening has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s since his first presidency. In 2017, the Futurama and Disenchantment creator put a spin on Trump’s aim at Hillary Clinton, leading a Comic-con crowd in a “Lock him up!” chant after 21st Century Fox executives asked him to soften The Simpsons’ criticism of Fox News. The show had joked that Fox News is “not racist, but No. 1 with racists.”
The show has been critical of Trump and his acolytes regularly over the years. Executive producer Al Jean said the show abandoned its usual “even-handed” approach to politics when Trump came into power, telling ScreenRant in 2020, “Trump has been engaged in so much illegal activities as documented by the New York Times, you just go, oh this is crazy. No president in my life has violated policy like this; no president had a rally at the White House. You can’t be even-handed when the subject at hand is not, that’s my view.”
Jean wasn’t alone in his view, and after years of avoiding social media, Groening joined Instagram in 2020 just to debut his anti-Trump song, “Trump’s Rhapsody.” In the song, Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson, sings, “My name is Trumpy / There’s no other man like me, even though I’m so grumpy / The reason I’m grumpy and so goddamned plump-rumpy / and so frumpy and schlumpy / is because the losers won’t leave me alone.”
The song remains spread across the only two posts on Groening’s profile, which he captioned, “Let’s stop the #TrumpyTantrum.”
“It’s a fun little song,” he told The Wrap at the time, “Let’s hope after Election Day it becomes a quaint historical artifact.”
Trump isn’t the only one MAGA figure who took some shots from Groening Monday, however, as he wondered aloud to Maron how the president’s chief of staff Stephen Miller “could go to Santa Monica High School and turn out like” that.
Maron had a theory. “Because he was clearly annoying and hated,” the host replied. “And it seems to me that the only way he could push back on it was leaning into it… He liked being a, a f—ing iconoclastic c—,” he added. “So this is what we get. A Jewish Nazi.”
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