Donald Trump got the race he wanted over the weekend, drawing loyal supporters and curious spectators to Washington.
But the spectacle came with an unexpected problem: viewers kept finding familiar images hiding in the White House’s promotional artwork.
The Freedom 250 Grand Prix raced through downtown Washington on Sunday, Aug. 23. The city’s first street race drew criticism for turning the National Mall into a racetrack, borrowing a blueprint from an already successful event.
Some called the track dangerous because of its concrete barriers. Yet others called the two-day event a reckless spectacle that puts public spaces at risk.
Trump established the event by executive order in January, routing an IndyCar circuit past the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol as a centerpiece of the country’s 250th anniversary.
Selling it fell to the White House, which spent weeks pushing promotional artwork online. Even if that means copy and paste.
On Aug. 21, a racing journalist posted a flyer for the Freedom 250 graphics side by side with a Porsche poster for their January-released Rolex 24 at Daytona.
Both images share the same overhead angle, the same looping red-and-blue track curling across the frame, and the same cars scattered along the bends. Only the color scheme and the vehicles had changed.
“Huh, I thought that looked familiar…,” she wrote.
The next day, another post went further and lined up four images at once.
One image, as reported by The Daily Beast, paired a vintage-style Freedom 250 poster. It showed a blue-and-star-spangled race car roaring past the Lincoln Memorial under cherry blossoms.
On the opposite side, a 1935 poster for the Monaco Grand Prix. The layout is close to identical.
The car in the same low three-quarter angle, the same landmark backdrop rising behind it, the same block lettering stacked across the bottom.
Coincidence? Arguably not when it comes to the Trump administration.
Another compared a White House “out of office” graphic to one made for the Singapore Grand Prix. Both use a motion-blurred shot of a car sweeping across a curb. Both stack the words the same way. One says the writer is off to the Freedom 250. The other says Singapore.
The White House also reworked the poster for Disney’s “Cars” into a stars-and-stripes version and posted it on the official Facebook and Instagram page.
Then the replies started stacking up. “Wow. It’s the copy and paste administration,” one user wrote under an X post. A second person kept their response to four words: “Stealing stuff as usual.”
And one reply drew the line a lot of people were drawing. “The marketing strategy is finding cool designs and throwing them into Gr0k to make whatever AI Slop they need to post. Zero creativity,” someone wrote.
That last complaint has follow-through. Trump has leaned hard on AI-generated imagery throughout his second term, regularly posting digitally made pictures to Truth Social.
He shrugged off one image depicting him as Jesus Christ by claiming the figure was supposed to be a doctor.
Racing fans had their own objection, and it had nothing to do with trademark infringement. Several pointed out that the cars in the Freedom 250 art do not look like IndyCars at all. “Actually driving me insane they’re not even trying to make the cars look like IndyCars,” one wrote.
The event itself was, by most measures, a success.
Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood won the 147-lap race in front of a free-admission crowd, with the broadcast carried live on Fox. But the promotion around it has been rough from the jump.
Days before the green flag, the White House put out a Grand Prix celebration post that collapsed when viewers zoomed in on a photo and started asking about the person standing next to Trump.
The moment fits a larger pattern: Nearly every visual the administration releases, including its redesign of the White House reflecting pool.
Neither the White House nor IndyCar has commented on where the artwork came from, and no one has said who made it.
Trump wanted a spectacle built to look historic. But the internet decided to show everyone which history it was actually lifted from.
