Suggesting that even virtual Donald Trumps are generally more trouble than they’re worth, Motherboard has a report this week detailing all the headaches that America’s 45th president is causing for the Imagineers at Disney’s famed Hall Of Presidents. The main trouble the Hall is facing is a heightened version of the same political annoyances the attraction faces every four or eight years, when a new White House resident (who most of America inevitably hates) is elected into office. This year, though, the problems are exacerbated by the attraction’s routine inclusion of a presidential speech from the Hall’s latest robotic incumbent, and the question of whether Disney wants to serve as a platform for Trump’s particularly vitriolic take on free speech.
Speaking with an anonymous source, Motherboard learned that, while Trump will absolutely appear in the Hall, there are people at Disney who really aren’t enthused about having Trump follow in the footsteps of Presidents Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, all of whom recorded speeches for the show. The offer has officially been extended to the White House, but the Trump administration has yet to respond. (The article suggests Disney is making the whole process slightly more inconvenient for the president than it needs to be, in the hopes of getting Trump to drop out with no loss of face on either side.)
The most depressing detail of this whole debacle, though, is only indirectly Trump’s fault. Like so many Americans, the Hall Of Presidents team seems to have thoroughly expected Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election, to the point that plans were already in place for her own animatronic. (There were discussions about which pantsuit to depict her in.) Luckily, they held back on the actual construction, although we can’t help but point out that the image of a robotic Hillary Clinton sinking into molten metal, a la Terminator 2, does feel like a pretty fitting metaphor for our current political climate.