ORLANDO, FLORIDA — One of the longest running attractions at Walt Disney World is the Hall of Presidents. In it, guests are transported through American history and — thanks to animatronic versions of them — are able to meet several presidents. For his own robotic analog, current President Barack H. Obama (D-Kenya) recorded his dialogue in both English and Sharia. This week, the attraction closed for six months so that Imagineers can develop a new addition to be added to the experience — President Donald Trump.
“We weren’t too worried about a Hillary Clinton animatron,” Jim Kanash, one of Disney’s top Imagineers told reporters on a conference call this morning, “because as long as we got the pantsuit right, we were about halfway home.”
When it comes to President-elect Trump however, Mr. Kanash is not sure his team has enough time or resources to pull off his mechanical doppelganger.
“We’ve built animatronic versions of pirates that represent more educated and evolved people than Mr. Trump,” Kanash said, “so this is going to be quite the challenge for us. We’ve never had to create such an obviously stupid and racist animatron before. We’re going to have to dig deep.”
Kanash says some “special modifications” were made to the Trump robot that other animatronic figures in Disney’s theme parks don’t have.
“We completely stripped out its logic board,” Kanash said, “because it and Trump’s personality programming weren’t compatible. Every time it’d go to say something racist or stupid, the logic board would cut him off, sit him down, and quietly shit his own pants, as I think we all wish Trump’s brain would force him to do.”
In order to prepare Trump’s mechanical facsimile, Kanash says he and has team have been scanning in secession letters from Confederate states and having its on board computer hang out on 4chan and Stormfront message boards. He says that this technique has “definitely helped” imbue Robot Trump with a “healthy dose of racism” but his team is having a hard time getting the animatronic recreation of the alleged billionaire and reality-TV D-List celebrity “dumb enough.”
“We’ve hooked the Trump-bot up to a feed that just dumps Sean Hannity’s TV program into its hard drive,” Kanash said, “and that is definitely helping it develop the unwarranted hubris he needs. But surprisingly, Hannity’s only making the bot about 75% as dumb as it’ll eventually need to be. We’re hoping simultaneously streaming old broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show will put us well-over the stupid threshold we have in mind.”
Independent voters will be happy to know that Imagineers did consider third party candidates.
“We had a Gary Johnson animatron made up,” Kanash said, “but he didn’t know where Disney World was, so he wound-up in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter up the road at Universal. Which, honestly, is probably a better home for a guy like Gary anyway, if you think about it.”
The new Hall of Presidents featuring President Donald Trump will re-open in the Fall of 2017.
Follow James on Twitter @JamboSchlarmbo.