What if America chose imagination over experience—fairy tale over firebrand?

In this haunting installment of Not This Time, the Archivist recovers a timeline in which Walt Disney is drafted as the Democratic nominee in 1964, sweeping into the presidency on a wave of televised charm and national grief. But the dreams he sells come with consequences: monorails glide through model cities while napalm rains in Southeast Asia. Civil rights are honored with gestures, but justice comes late and wrapped in sentiment.

This episode doesn’t ask whether Walt Disney was a good president—it asks what happens when a nation mistakes comfort for clarity, nostalgia for progress, and myth for memory.

Delta 27. Disney in the White House. The fable was real. The cost was, too.