Donald Trump Is Fighting With Disney World Over Hall Of Presidents Robot
UPDATE: Vice retracted their articles on Trump and Disney "after a thorough investigation into the sourcing" and "the identification of several factual errors" on Tuesday, June 27.
EARLIER: Barack Obama, the Democrats, "Fake News CNN," Disney World.
The latter now has what the previous four already did: A contentious relationship with President Donald Trump's administration.
That is, at least, the picture painted by Vice's Motherboard, which reported on Monday, June 26, that the Trump administration has been "combative" with officials from Walt Disney World's Hall of Presidents.
Motherboard quoted an anonymous source claiming Trump's team tried to shut Disney out of the process by which new presidents are included in the hall, leading to delays in Trump's inclusion at the show.
The Imagineers [the researchers and developers behind Disney's theme park attractions] tried to point out that they're typically involved with this process, that they directly collaborated with Clinton, Bush, and Obama's people when it came to figuring out what the President's Audio-Animatronic figure would say. Trump's people said, 'No. We're writing this speech. You guys have no input on this.'
Disney's Hall of Presidents is an attraction dedicated to American history and featured avery elected president since the country's founding.
The past three presidents -- Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama -- were all featured giving speeches at the end of the hall's show, via a robot made in their likeness.
Those presidents worked with Disney to craft a benign, non-partisan message appropriate for a family setting, Motherboard reports. Now, the Trump team's handling of a seemingly straightforward task -- working together to create a short speech about patriotism -- has stalled the process.
The hall was previously scheduled to be open for the summer, but now the opening date has been pushed back to the fall, Motherboard reports.
Still, there is a concern among Disney staff that the president could do what he does with just about every feud: turn the issue into Twitter material.
Motherboard quoted a source inside Disney as saying,
There are those at Imagineering who hope that if they hold off on doing anything with this attraction until the fall, Trump may have done something so egregious that the general public won't have an issue with putting a non-talking version of [Trump] in The Hall of Presidents.
In other words, there are hopes the president avoids tweeting about drama.
Good luck with that.
