What Is The Trump Animatronic Conspiracy?

It seems that for some reason, people are once again wondering about the Trump animatronic at The Hall of Presidents in Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom park. It has been the focus of a long-standing rumor and speculation, given how his face looked when it was released. 

A recent viral X post seems to have stoked the flames of the rumor once again.

https://t.co/L3Hus3Z4wR pic.twitter.com/EmXBlN4xVI

— Fiona Small (@FionaSmall) February 26, 2024

What is the Trump Animatronic Conspiracy?

The rumor has been that the Imagineers were so convinced that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 Presidential election they had already crafted an animatronic for her. When she lost, they just repurposed her animatronic as Donald Trump. 

When you look at the animatronic and photos of both Clinton and Trump, you can kind of see where the idea came from.

After Trump won the election, his animatronic took a very long time to appear in the Hall of Presidents attraction. 

When his animatronic finally appeared, it looked like this:

Then in July of 2023, an Imagineer allegedly confirmed this theory to Alex Goldman via a message that allegedly said:

“Every time there’s a new president that gets elected to office, the hall of presidents has to close for several months at a time in order to get the new president animatronic installed in the hall. The whole show has to change, and it ends up being a bit of a shit show. In 2016, the Disney executives were adamant that they were going to have as little down time 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.

I mean, honestly, we all laughed. The thing is that Bob Iger was a really big Hillary supporter. I think there was just a real urge on the part of the executives overseeing the HOP project to please him, and I think it all ended up just blowing up in everyone’s faces. Whenever a president gets elected, they record a little spiel that gets used in the new Hall of President’s show. It can sometimes take months to get recorded with everything that a new president has going on during their first year in office. I’d be willing to bet that Hillary had already recorded her spiel even before the election.

“So, yeah, 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. And, that’s the thing that can take the longest and be the hardest to design on the animatronics. My guess is that they probably originally tried to salvage the animatronic by keeping Hillary’s skull and putting Trump’s skin over top of it.“

So, if this is true, it would indeed seem that the animatronic was made for Hillary Clinton and quickly altered to fit a Donald Trump animatronic.

What is even more compelling is that Disney did fix the Trump animatronic later. It now looks more like him and less like Clinton.

Given how much closer he looks now compared to when he debuted, and given how well Biden’s animatronic looks, it’s easy to see why so many believe this theory. 

What do you think? Comment and let us know!