The founding era’s premier beefcake is uniquely adaptable to an alpha aesthetic. He was famous for his bearing—his height, musculature, and command. The gimmick works because Washington has always been the most physically legible of the founders. Thomas Jefferson praised him as “the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback,” and later biographers, whom I dub “the thigh men,” would marvel at the way his legs gripped the flanks of a horse.
That’s not how we talk about the rest of the founding fathers—Jefferson bookish, Madison short, Adams annoying. But Washington is obviously imposing. His monument doesn’t even have a face. It’s just a giant phallic symbol visible from nearly anywhere in the capital. The founder-to-president pipeline is populated by a bunch of guys who played JV to get into college, and Washington didn’t even go to college. He went straight to the frontier. (No matter that he was an autodidact, obsessive in his research.)
Mr. Neutrality has vanished. In his place, Beck installs a digital body. Not a simulacrum of his real body, of course. Washington’s famous tight mouth—part bearing, part necessity—rarely opened easily. By the time he took office, only one of his teeth remained. He wore dentures fitted with a mix of materials, including teeth likely purchased from enslaved people, which made speaking painful. He wasn’t chatty—and he had little patience for loud, impertinent empty cans of people.
And the real body’s reputation predates the pesky War of Independence. Beck prefers Washington, the loyal subject: a colonial officer chasing advancement in the British imperial system—ambitious, reckless, sent to negotiate, but instead helping to ignite the French and Indian War. In a letter to the royal governor of Virginia, he didn’t dwell on that; he complained about not having the same benefits as his British counterparts. This was Washington before his convictions took hold. The one who was a good boy.
Young Washington was opportunistic, happy to deal where advantage lay, eager to marry up—a yes-man if circumstances demanded it—until he wasn’t. It took years of failed attempts to reason with the British: six years fighting them, and eight more as president, keeping the United States out of other people’s wars. But a post-Declaration Washington is far too inconvenient for someone trying to retrofit him. Dumb it down, Beck told AI Washington, and it did—abandoning the “Farewell Address” Washington actually wrote for one he didn’t: a warning of moral decline tailored to Beck’s audience.
Beck is seemingly familiar with none of that history, personally or professionally—and the swaps line up neatly: a non-interventionist turned Iran hawk, a deist recast as an evangelical, a man who dreaded partisanship now a guest on a culture warrior’s podcast. Each distortion is what happens when the body does the persuading, and the ideas are just the wardrobe.
AI Washington can be made to bless positions that the real Washington spent years warning against. His early presidency was dominated by the question of how a fragile republic survived infancy, and he made a call: profit, not war. He doubled down in the 1796 Farewell Address, urging the United States to have “as little political connection as possible” with foreign nations. In the same address, he warned that parties could become “potent engines” by which “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” would seize power. This is not a man itching to be retrofitted into a twenty-first-century partisan machine. When AI Washington warns that “peace is not the default,” it flips the real Washington’s governing instinct on its head.