In 2010, the Chrysler Corporation released a television commercial for the new Dodge Challenger, a much-loved muscle car brand returning to the market after a twenty-five-year hiatus. Expectations for the latest Challenger ran high, and the marketing campaign aimed to capitalize on the anticipation with a commercial that preceded the car's release. Set in Revolutionary-era America, the advertisement opened with the sound of a lone fiddler, and a colonial-era British redcoat running through the woods. When the scout finds his regiment of fellow soldiers, he breathlessly tells the commanding officer what he has seen. The scout's report—muted to the audience, who can only hear the quaint and ominous fiddler— prompts the British officer to order his regiment into columns. The tension builds as a pensive British platoon level and load muskets, gaze into the distance, and take aim, waiting to discover what the scout already knows. The camera pans across a quiet and seemingly vacant American landscape.

The tranquility evaporates with the roar of a V8 engine, and the placid trepidation of British troops turns to abject horror when three marauding Dodge Challengers tear onto the grassy battlefield. One of the cars bears a huge American flag standing upright through the passenger window. Redcoats scramble in utter disorder as General Washington, who sits casually in the driver's seat of a Challenger, slashes through the pitch. When the skirmish ends—we presume, because the advertisement shows no overt violence—the camera returns to General Washington standing victorious alongside his steel and fiberglass stallion with the American flag flapping gloriously. A sonorous narrator concludes, “Here's a couple of things America got right: cars and freedom.”

The absurd and anachronistic nature of the commercial prompts viewers to dismiss it, to class it as a clever gag or marketing ploy that purposely strays so far beyond reality that its sole purpose is to grab our attention, and nothing more. But underlying the humor and hyperbole, the ad can tell us more about historical contexts and presidential images. Presidents and the presidency have long featured in commercial advertising, often as a way of connecting contemporary contexts with the past. The Chrysler ad, for example, deliberately overlapped with the 2010 World Cup and the much-hyped clash between England and the United States.