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The Hall of Presidents usually isn’t the first stop people are making when they enter Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Orlando, but it’s still going strong since it opened at the park in 1971.
That attraction—which is located in a building inspired by Independence Hall in Philadelphia—is largely absent of the thrills provided by some more popular rides.
However, it does allow visitors to cool off and spend some time off of their feet while getting a bit of a crash course in American history courtesy of the animatronic figures of every president to ever occupy the White House.
Disney World has routinely updated the Hall of Presidents in the wake of every election since the early 1990s, and in 2017, Donald Trump was added to the line-up after beating Hillary Clinton in the general election.
However, a number of people sensed something was amiss when the Trump animatronic was unveiled, as it was a bit hard to ignore it bore a somewhat uncanny resemblance to the Democrat who ran against him.
That led to a number of people floating a conspiracy theory that suggested the folks at Disney World had assumed Clinton was going to win the election and started designing a robot in her image only to scramble to adjust after Trump defied the polls and experts who projected he was going to lose.
Now, it appears that theory has been confirmed courtesy of former Reply All co-host Alex Goldman, who penned a Substack article featuring some inside information from a Disney World Imagineer who was apparently familiar with the development of the animatronic in question, saying:
“In 2016, the Disney executives were adamant that they were going to have as little downtime as possible before reopening the show.
“The problem is they backed the wrong horse. Everyone was positive that Hillary was going to win so much so that they created her animatronic, then they got caught with their pants down when Trump won. It can take months if not years to design a new animatronic.
I remember seeing the facial designs for the Hillary animatronic at least six months before the election and an intern asked the 3D artist what would happen if Trump won, and he laughed and just said, “Then, we’re screwed”…
The animatronic was originally meant to be Hillary. I think the thing that made it obvious to everyone was that it had Hillary’s facial structure.”
Goldman noted he wasn’t able to exhaustively vet the source but that he had enough proof to believe they were indeed a Disney employee familiar with the matter, which is good enough for me.