Credit: Dangerous Minds / Public Domain / Daniel Torok

Living through 2016 was an experience that fundamentally broke a lot of people’s belief that anything could make sense if given enough time and thought. That sense would most often prevail, and fundamentally, people were good even if they needed to be given a few chances to get there.

Then Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.

It’s one thing for a celebrity to get elected to the highest office in the land. This is America we’re talking about; it wasn’t even the first time it happened. Before taking charge of the White House and comprehensively ruining everything in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was best known for talking to a chimp in low-budget Hollywood pictures. However, people at least thought Reagan was charming in a folksy, if somewhat brainless way. This, however, was Donald Trump.

A sleazy, B-list game show host. A violent, misogynist, vacant bully who no one respected, especially not his paymasters in Moscow, who had him on a leash. Up until he got into politics, he was most known for firing people on The Apprentice and hosting beauty pageants, when he wasn’t barging his way into the dressing rooms of underage girls. However, since he was going up against a woman and, again, this is America, he was elected president. Still, it was enough to break a number of people’s understanding of the world.

This was despite a few people calling it well in advance. Michael Moore has spent the last decade dining out on the fact that he knew Trump was going to win from the start. The keys to the White House also predicted his victory back when that actually meant something. Hell, even The Simpsons, in their infinite wisdom, had an offhand mention of “President Trump” in one of their episodes set in the future. However, the most bizarre prediction of our current hellscape came long before any of this.

In fact, it came around a good half a century before the decrepit POTUS was even born.

What predicted the current and possible future Trump presidency?

Despite sounding like a Charles Dickens character, Ingersoll Lockwood was a real guy born in 1841, and he would go on to lead a truly distinguished life.

By the age of 21, he was appointed consul to the Kingdom of Hanover (what we’d today call Lower Saxony in Germany) by Abraham Lincoln himself, before setting up a successful law firm after four years on the job. In the 1880s, Lockwood began branching out into lecturing and, most pertinently to this story, novel writing.

Despite being a respected, frighteningly intelligent man who could most likely turn his pen to anything at all, Lockwood decided to work on children’s novels. Most notably, a series whose title character will cause a double-take in most people. They concern a precocious, arrogant aristocrat named, and I’m not kidding here, Baron Trump. Who spent his entire life cooped up in a palatial estate bearing his family name and whose closest confidante is legitimately called Don. However, any kind of relationship between the two might be a departure from real life, given the fact that Donald himself seems to forget the existence of any kid of his he doesn’t want to fuck.

However, beyond the names, the Baron Trump duology doesn’t compare to our modern reality all that much. No, the really disturbing stuff comes from Lockwood’s third book, a standalone effort that described a New York City sent into a frenzied panic by an outsider winning the American presidency on a dangerously populist platform. He had a man named Pence as his running mate. He had mobs of people protesting his election outside his Fifth Avenue address.

The name of this book is a bleak omen as well, considering all the talk that Trump himself has burbled about cancelling elections. It’s called The Last President. One can only hope that’s a prediction that doesn’t come true.