Here Come Trump’s ‘Freedom Trucks’

Photographs by Brad Trone Right now, six AI-Generated George Washingtons are roaming around the country in semitrucks, stopping at sites as varied as the New Mexico desert and the National Mall and attracting lines in some places that would rival those at Disney World. On an afternoon last month at an American Legion parking lot in Bel Air, Maryland, locals—many sporting the Stars and Stripes in cap, tee, and even Croc form—waited for a glimpse of the past with an eagerness history teachers could only dream of. “Introducing: the Freedom Truck, a mobile museum,” a deep voice boomed to crescendoing music. “Go back in time and experience the dawn of America.”The “Freedom Trucks” are part of the official celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday, an 18-wheel complement to the fairs, rallies, and work crews currently proliferating in Washington, D.C. When you enter one, after walking past a reproduction of a painting of English colonists praying before a cross, you meet the animated Washington, who tells you sternly that despite their differences, the 13 colonies agreed: “Our rights are a gift from God, not a favor from kings or courts.”It’s a familiar-sounding line, invoking the core American concept of inalienable rights, but the statement isn’t actually from Washington. Lindsay Chervinsky, the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, told me in an email that the quote doesn’t even sound like the first president. “He regularly spoke of providence and a higher power, but usually called on republican values and virtues to defend his positions.” A similar sentence can, however, be found in an events tool kit from Freedom 250, the White House–led group behind the trucks, under suggested “faith-based messaging.” President Trump has had much to say about how museums treat our country’s past. He has griped about the Smithsonian’s focus on slavery’s horrors, and his administration has asserted that the public has no tolerance for museum