Usually when a public figure is depicted in statue form, the results are incredibly rude. Remember what that museum in Montreal did to poor Justin Trudeau? But in the case of the animatronic Donald Trump newly installed at Walt Disney World’s Hall of Presidents, I gotta say…this is a real improvement. I can actually look at this robot without dry heaving.
If you take a hard look, you’ll see that Trump’s most offensively murine features have been downplayed considerably: The beady eyes—which in real life struggle for sight through puff-pastry eyelids—have been pried open. The pinched butthole-mouth has relaxed horizontally. The hair, while still preposterous, looks more like that of small-town eccentric—the kind of old-timer who makes waitresses roll their eyes when he tips them in nickels—than that of a senile megalomaniac bent on world destruction.
And the hands. First of all, those babies are at least three times their actual size. Second, Robot Trump doesn’t employ Real Trump’s signature thumb-to-forefinger jab, a motion so viscerally offensive I regret that humans were given fingers at all. Robot Trump’s hand gestures are sweeping and, dare I say, borderline magnanimous. Muted, this looks like a Fake President I could watch on TV without breaking immediately into rage-sweat.
Regretfully, the voice that emanates from the robot does belong to Trump himself, though it’s obviously inaccurate in that he manages to get through the entire thing without drifting off on a tangent in which he inevitably says something blatantly untrue, deeply offensive, or most likely, both.
In conclusion, put Real Trump in a box and give us this thing instead. It may not be human, but it’s so much better than the alternative.
