The library smelled of new wood and sunscreen. A ribbon fell, cameras stuttered, and President Trump stepped forward to tell the crowd he had just held a conversation with a dead president — via an AI avatar. I watched the clip and felt the room tilt: history, performance, and silicon all folded together.
I’ll tell you what happened, why Microsoft and LemonSlice matter, and what the exchange says about how we let machines rephrase our past. Read this as a field note from inside the theater where tech meets myth.
The ribbon was cut at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora; the crowd leaned in
The scene looked ceremonial: speeches, a red ribbon, and a presidential visit. Trump used the moment to describe an odd encounter — he said he asked an AI version of Theodore Roosevelt about the Panama Canal and even pressed the question that has been recycled at rallies for years: whether the canal was “given away” for $1 (that is, $1 (≈ €1)).
That claim is misleading. President Jimmy Carter signed treaties in 1977 launching the process of handing control to Panama; the handover finished in 1999. Newsweek examined the $1 claim and found it to be nonsense. The crowd cheered anyway, and the story spread faster than the museum’s curated guidebook.
A control panel stood at the exhibit entrance; visitors swiped an RFID bracelet to begin
You can walk up to a console, swipe a “compass” bracelet, and press a button to talk with “TR.” That’s the exhibit called Talk With TR, built with Microsoft and the AI lab LemonSlice.
According to LemonSlice CEO Lina Colucci, the project layered an LLM trained on Roosevelt’s speeches, letters, and books beneath a real-time video model that gives him a face and gestures. Microsoft supplied support and scale; an actor recorded lines to match surviving descriptions of the real president’s voice. The result is a scripted, adaptive avatar that greets you by name, shifts tone for children, and keeps answers at a PG-13 level.
Did Teddy Roosevelt build the Panama Canal?
Short answer: he started the U.S. effort. Roosevelt pushed for the canal’s construction after 1903 and watched steam shovels and engineers shape the project; the waterway opened in 1914. The AI avatar framed the canal as one of Roosevelt’s proudest battles, but it also pointed to domestic achievements — parks, food and drug protections, and what it called the “square deal.”
President Trump asks AI President Roosevelt…“Do you consider the Panama Canal your greatest achievement?” pic.twitter.com/zvfDCL2sKS
— Margo Martin (@MargoMartin47) July 1, 2026
Video clips were posted online; what you see is a cropped slice of the encounter
Short social videos show Trump asking about the canal; longer footage hasn’t been publicly released. Eric Trump posted an incomplete clip, and Colucci says the full interaction included follow-up questions about war and presidency. That partial view lets rumors grow: Trump later told the crowd the Democrats “gave the Panama Canal away” for $1 (≈ €1), a line that landed as both a jab and a sound bite.
.@POTUS interacts with AI President Theodore Roosevelt at the Theodore Roosevelt Library in North Dakota pic.twitter.com/4ISRo2Tsbj
— Margo Martin (@MargoMartin47) July 1, 2026
Did the US sell the Panama Canal for $1?
No. The idea of a $1 sale is a simplification that distorts the facts. The Carter administration negotiated treaties in 1977 to transfer control; the process was decades-long and accompanied by complex diplomatic, financial, and legal arrangements. Saying “$1” is a rhetorical flourish that simplifies a long diplomatic process into a claim that sounds transactional.
The exhibit team arrived before sunrise to clear security; Secret Service agents asked their own questions
Colucci said her staff had to be on site early because of presidential security. Agents reportedly pressed the avatar about early Secret Service practices; historically, the agency assumed full-time presidential protection after McKinley’s assassination in 1901. The assassination is the reason Roosevelt, then vice president, became the youngest president at 42.
Those small moments—agents testing the AI—are revealing. You can see government technicians using the same public tech platforms you might use for work: LLM tooling, real-time video models, and a voice actor giving the avatar character. Microsoft’s involvement signals how big vendors are moving from research demos into museums and public spaces.
A child asked TR about food and color; the AI replied in a different tone
Kids find the exhibit magnetic. Colucci described listeners asking about Roosevelt’s favorite food and color, and the system shifting to a simpler register. The team built a kid mode that softens vocabulary and shortens answers, which changes the interaction’s emotional texture: a commanding president becomes an approachable storyteller.
How does the AI “Talk With TR” work?
Think of it as three layers: an LLM trained on primary texts and speeches, a voice actor recording lines that match historical tone, and a video model that maps facial movement and gestures in real time. LemonSlice calls that graphics layer a way to give Roosevelt “his face and his body,” and Microsoft provided infrastructure to run the system in a public setting.
The experience is persuasive but fragile. An avatar trained on public texts will echo the biases and omissions of its sources. It can produce memorable lines that Roosevelt never said, and the crowd will laugh, applaud, or repeat them as if they were fact. That’s where the danger lives: convincing performance becoming accepted history.
The exhibit feels like a séance in a glass case, and the avatar speaks as if a gramophone had learned to argue.
I’ve seen museums adopt interactive displays before; this one amplifies a political moment. You should ask: when an AI summarizes a life, who edits the highlights and who benefits from the applause?
Trump: “I even had a conversation with Theodore Roosevelt. I said, ‘What do you think about the Panama Canal? Do you consider that your greatest achievement and how do you feel about the fact that the Democrats gave the Panama Canal away to Panama for $1?’”
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) July 1, 2026 at 12:44 PM
Microsoft and LemonSlice are building a format we’ll see in more museums: interactive avatars that trade on persona and pathos. Gizmodo covered Colucci’s comments; Newsweek handled the fact-check of the $1 claim. Eric Trump’s posted clip and the Secret Service’s curiosity show how institutions, platforms, and families all feed the same media loop.
I’ll leave you with this: if a machine can make a historical figure speak, who gets to script the applause and who rewrites the quiet parts of history?