The 26th president died in 1919. On Wednesday, the 47th said he had a chat with him anyway.

A conversation across a century

Visiting the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, President Trump told the crowd he had spoken with an AI version of Roosevelt, asking it about the Panama Canal, The Hill reported. The library's centerpiece is a lifelike avatar of Roosevelt built by Microsoft's AI For Good Lab that visitors can question about his life and views. Footage showed the digital Roosevelt offering Trump what amounted to a pep talk about keeping one's nerve and putting the nation first; Trump called it "fantastic."

Inside the 'living library'

The library, which opens to the public on July 4, describes itself as a "living library," according to Microsoft. Underneath the avatar sits a system that ingests hundreds of thousands of archival documents — letters, speeches, diaries — and uses AI to make them searchable in plain language, then synthesizes that record into interactive conversations. Microsoft says it plans to open-source the software and that the exhibit will keep improving as more material is digitized. A similar AI George Washington has appeared at a separate administration-backed event on the National Mall.

The debate over digital resurrection

Museums have rushed to add AI historical figures, drawn by the promise of making the past feel immediate. But historians and ethicists caution that an avatar's answers are not memories; they are probabilities assembled from text, and can capture a figure's rhetorical surface while missing the context that gave the words meaning. Others stress transparency — the European Union's AI rules require labeling AI-generated content — warning that without clear disclosure a simulated lecture can blur into pseudo-history. Efforts like Tennessee's 2024 law protecting voice and likeness, and a UNESCO call for guidelines on AI in museums, reflect a field still working out the rules.

A note of irony

There was an added wrinkle in the setting. Roosevelt, who protected vast tracts of public land and helped found the American conservation movement, was honored at a library on federal land in the Badlands he once ranched — even as the current administration has moved to open large areas of protected land to drilling. Trump, by his account, did not raise that with the AI. For now, the digital Roosevelt keeps dispensing encouragement to visitors, leaving the question of whether it is history or theater to each of them.