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Louise Thomas
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Channel 4 has pulled an episode of The Simpsons over the weekend following the attempted assassination of former US president, Donald Trump.
Trump was attending a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday (13 July) when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks took aim at him from a nearby rooftop. The former president left the podium surrounded by the Secret Service. A bullet scraped his ear, but he is said to be relatively uninjured.
Eagle-eyed viewers noticed that the event had affected Channel 4’s programmed scheduling of The Simpsons. The show is known for covering subject material bearing an uncanny resemblance to reality at times, leading many fans to feel it often prophesies the future.
An episode titled “Lisa the Iconoclast” was due to air at 1pm on Sunday (14 July) – a day after the attack– as the network continued to run episodes from its seventh season. But the episode was abruptly replaced by another instalment from a later season.
In the original episode, a law enforcement officer is seen on a nearby rooftop, taking aim at Lisa as she stands at a podium in a rally – similar in appearance to the one attended by Trump on his campaign trail.
A description for the episode summarises, “Lisa finds out that Springfield’s founder was a murderous pirate who tried to assassinate George Washington, and decides her fellow citizens should know the truth.”
Instead, the episode was replaced with one from season 30, titled “Baby You Can’t Drive”, which follows Marge and Homer as they work together at a tech company that makes self-driving cars.
“Wondered at first why Channel 4 just pulled the scheduled broadcast of ‘Lisa the Iconoclast’, but I think I get,” wrote one person as they shared a still of a sniper on a roof near a rally.
Although the sniper in the episode is not an active shooter, fans also speculated that it could have been pulled because of the reference to the attempted assassination of another president.
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“Just to add to this that Jebediah Springfield trying to kill George Washington is also a major plot point in the episode, so it might have been pulled because of that without anyone remembering this specific sniper scene,” wrote one person.
The show has previously appeared to predict the former Home Alone 2 star’s presidency.
Shortly after the incident, Trump shared a post on Truth Social as he wrote: “Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers yesterday, as it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.
“We will fear not, but instead remain resilient in our faith and defiant in the face of wickedness.
“Our love goes out to the other victims and their families. We pray for the recovery of those who were wounded, and hold in our hearts the memory of the citizen who was so horribly killed.”
