Meet Dr. Benjamin Rush, the famous physician, academic and founding father, as featured in the Founders Gallery on the Freedom 250 website. His forehead is porcelain-smooth and flooded with light, his curls are shiny and curly, his nose is straight and regular. He stands upright, his head slightly tilted, an index finger placed shyly on his cheekbone, and looks directly at the viewer with methylene blue eyes and a faint smile.
Paintings of Rush made during his lifetime showed a man with straight hair and long, thin facial features. A portrait of Thomas Sully from 1812 shows him with a long, downturned nose and matching corners of his mouth, leaning on his desk with one hand and looking over the pages of an open book.
The bright, unreal Rush of Freedom 250 — the nonprofit formed to lead the Trump administration’s effort to seize control of this year’s 50th anniversary events — looks like a very different person from a different time. Or like no human from nowhere: A digital watermark on the image identifies it as a product of Google’s generative AI.
And he has lots of company. To educate the public about the 500th anniversary, Trump’s anniversary organization has given all of the dozens of Revolutionary War-era figures in the gallery similar artificial lights or completely fictional faces.
The men’s hairstyles and often their physiognomies often appear to resemble Gilbert Stuart’s canonical portrait of George Washington. They mostly wear similar clothes and repeat the same poses over and over again. And they share the AI watermark.
In a small subsection of the gallery are four “Ladies of the Revolution,” generally wearing swan necks, button noses, and nearly identical clothing. These women are particularly anachronistic, public historian Isabelle Roughol noted in a widely seen video this week. Dolley Madison, portrayed as an adult woman, would have been 8 years old at the time of the Revolution. (Martha Washington, nicknamed “Lady Washington” and a key figure in the war, is notably absent.)
The portrait of Abigail Adams seems particularly strange. For a woman who died in 1818, her face looks a little too taut, her eyes a little too big, her skin a little too fair. She looks like Anne Hathaway, who plays Adams in a biopic.
What she doesn’t look like are any available pictures of Abigail Adams. Consider Benjamin Blyth’s 1766 pastel portrait of 21-year-old Adams, completed shortly after her marriage to John Adams. Her face is almond-shaped with a slightly curved nose and a thin upper lip. The portrait in the digital gallery completes her face and provides an artistic nose job and lip filler. Her brown eyes are also enlarged to resemble an anime character.
Many of the other images appear to have their origins in real portraits, but their details appear to have been altered to appear more unified and to fit a more entrepreneurial vision of American history, said Zara Anishanslin, a historian at the University of Delaware and author of “The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution.”
The Freedom 250 versions of the founders stand in front of neoclassical columns and railings, decorative elements favored by the current Trump administration but not common in Revolutionary-era portraits. Some of the subjects’ repeated poses are also anachronistic. Some have their arms folded across their chests or fingers resting thoughtfully on their chin — or, in Rush’s case, a combination of both — which would not have been a standard pose for an 18th-century portraitist, Anishanslin said.
“It’s almost like modern CEO images are being grafted onto these 18th-century founders,” she said.
In a particularly eerie act of conformity, every man in the portrait gallery wears a nearly identical blue coat, even though they are dressed in various brown, black, gray and other colored garments in portraits from their lifetimes. Benjamin Franklin’s blue-clad portrait looks like a jaw-dropped version of an 18th-century portrait by French artist Joseph Duplessis, which showed Franklin in the plain gray coat he deliberately wore to contrast his country’s republican simplicity with the splendor of France, Anishanslin said.
The cut of the shoulders of the coats and the ties that the AI-generated founders wear with them are more closely associated with 19th century fashion than 18th century fashion, according to Anishanslin. And there are other oddities: Thomas Jefferson appears to have been closely modeled on his official portrait by Rembrandt Peale, but his eyes – which are ambiguously colored in real life – have been changed from Peale’s dark brown to a clear blue (Jefferson’s pose now includes a hand thoughtfully stroking his chin). One man after another sports the puffed sides of George Washington’s hairstyle, sometimes accompanied by a glimpse of Washington’s signature hairstyle or ponytail.
Entire rows of them—Francis Lightfoot Lee, George Clymer, George Read, arranged alphabetically by first name—simply resemble repeated images of Washington. Clicking on each one reveals a capsule biography and a semi-faithful version of an authentic portrait. The effect is as if the user turned off a George Washington face filter.
All male portraits have something else in common: a SynthID watermark. The digital marker will be embedded in media created using Google’s AI products to help distinguish between real and fake images. The women’s portraits did not contain SynthID watermarks, but an AI detection tool detected that they contained synthetic elements.
The only figure, man or woman, not shown wearing the identical blue of the American flag is the poet Phillis Wheatley, who wears a pastel shade and also happens to be the only black man featured in the gallery.
“This light blue dress really stands out,” Anishanslin said. “It’s supposed to differentiate them from the others.”
The web gallery is designed as an educational resource. Each capsule biography includes a short video created in collaboration with the conservative media organization PragerU. The videos begin with a relatively historically accurate portrait of the person – which then rotates and becomes an animated simulacrum that talks about that person’s role in the founding of the country.
The brilliant uniformity of the images also serves a political purpose, Anishanslin said.
“The message is clearly conveyed that the founders were a united group of people and that they were united in their ideologies and policies in founding the nation,” she said. “And that narrative is simply not true.”
However, historical accuracy is not the only rubric by which art is judged. Anishanslin pointed to painter Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 depiction of George Washington crossing the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War.
“It’s inaccurate in a number of ways, but it was a moment of heroism,” she said.
In the 1980s, Hollywood began collaborating with the Department of Defense on films that would paint a more triumphant, patriotic portrait of the military compared to the critical films made in the shadow of the Vietnam War. For an administration fixated on promoting a romanticized triumphant past — particularly on romanticizing the injustices of the past — and for a president obsessed with AI art, the revolution’s gallery of Yassified figures signals a desire to return to an era of American prestige and pride.
Like the 1851 depiction of Washington, these portraits blur the details of history in favor of fantasy. Jefferson’s blue eyes, the women’s covered breasts – a contemporary style probably based on morality; In 18th-century portraits, the upper chest was usually left bare, like Dolley Madison’s – and the matching suits all tell a story that contradicts history.
The production is somewhat similar to “Bridgerton,” Anishanslin said. Rather than being an accurate depiction of Regency-era life, “Bridgerton” appeals to viewers’ “cultural imagination” with its inaccurate costumes and tight-fitting corsets.
“This is different,” she said. “’Bridgerton’ is fun, pop culture and entertainment, but this is supposed to be a place steeped in history.”
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/03/us/freedom-250-ai-founding-fathers-portraits-cec
