Let Trump Keep Building Monuments to Himself
Donald Trump’s supporters really need to think bigger. A 15-foot-tall golden sculpture of the president—“Don Colossus” to friends—has recently been completed and will likely soon stand triumphantly, his fist in the air, atop a 7,000-pound pedestal that has already been installed at Trump’s Miami golf club. By the standards of leader worship, it might be too modest—Lilliputian when compared with the 40-foot-tall shining effigy that Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov built for himself in the late 1990s. That statue bestrode a 246-foot monument in the middle of Ashgabat and—get this—rotated 360 degrees daily so that it was always facing the sun.
At times, Trump’s desire to see his own outsize ego reflected in his physical surroundings, to wrap things in gold, supersize them, and then slap his name on them, seems to have no limit: the ballroom that ate the East Wing; the proposed “Arc de Trump”; the soon-to-be-gut-renovated Kennedy Center—sorry, Trump Kennedy Center. Now he wants to rename Dulles Airport and Penn Station after himself. Yet if he is hoping to match the grandiosity of world leaders of the past, he’s got a ways to go. Has Trump had an edition of The Art of the Deal copied out in his own blood (to rival Saddam Hussein’s very special Quran)? Does he walk around with a clique of female Fox News anchors carrying AK-47s (à la Muammar Qaddafi’s Amazonian guards)?
No and no. Or, maybe, not yet.
But the news about the statue makes you wonder about what new frontiers of presidential self-regard lay ahead of us. The project was organized by a group of cryptocurrency investors who raised $300,000 for it and have been using it to hype a memecoin called $PATRIOT. The sculptor, meanwhile, had no idea that his art would be used in this promotional way. Like many people who have worked on Trump-related projects over the decades, he is still awaiting full payment for his work, and he won’t release the colossus from his studio in Zanesville, Ohio, until the check arrives. As for Trump, he loves what he’s seen so far—“It LOOKS FANTASTIC,” he wrote in a letter to one of the organizers—and so not only will the statue most likely be erected in Miami before long, but a smaller version might also be headed for the White House.
Bear with me when I say something that many might find distasteful: Let’s have even more of this. The most effective way to highlight the unprecedentedly self-serving nature of Trump’s presidency has always been through moments when its abnormality is abject and undeniable. Moments that provide contrast. He separates families. He sends masked federal agents to terrorize various American cities. He calls his enemies “vermin” and “scum” and “Piggy.” For some of his fans, evidently, this is refreshing, the sign of a president willing to speak truthfully and shatter outdated norms. But mostly these moments have chipped away at his support, even among his voters, because they force everyone to gaze upon the true face of Trump.
[Read: Looks like Mussolini, quacks like Mussolini]
In case a reminder is needed: There is no tradition in America of presidents commissioning or even unveiling statues of themselves. Of course, there are a few famous postmortem monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial and Mount Rushmore. But even these can be controversial. When the sculptor Horatio Greenough created a 12-ton marble statue of President George Washington in 1842 for the centennial of the Founder’s birth, he modeled it on images of Zeus. People felt such deep discomfort at the sight of Washington in nothing but a toga and sandals—looking like he was relaxing in a sauna and showing off some admirable pecs—that it kept being schlepped around the Capitol, even landing at one point on the East Lawn, hidden in a shed.
Whether you are a president or not, endorsing a 15-foot golden statue of yourself suggests either an enormous ego or a drive to inspire fear—or both. In authoritarian countries where the Dear Leader’s image is a mandatory fixture in public or even private places—during the Cultural Revolution, a Mao Zedong portrait in your home was obligatory—it also risks telegraphing insecurity. The object of enforced idol worship might be compensating for being a mortal with earthbound power by literally representing themselves as omnipresent or larger than life.
Such self-aggrandizement has never been an attractive side of Trump—again, even for many of his supporters. Polls show that his voters want him to get things done: fix the economy and make it affordable, project strength on the world stage, make good deals. Burnishing his cult of personality is, for all but the most besotted or trollish, not on that list. Which is why those opposed to Trump might consider keeping quiet at the sight of false idols. Statues and nameplates reveal better than anything else how much his idea of power diverges from the traditional institution of the American presidency.
When oppressive regimes do collapse, the first thing people tend to do is topple the statues; this literal iconoclasm becomes an outlet for their relief and rage. Just over a year ago in Syria, when Bashar al-Assad’s rule ended, demonstrations of joy erupted all over the country and in many cases focused on tearing down images of him and his father. A huge bust in Damascus was pushed over, and people danced on its face. In Latakia, a giant bronze figure was knocked over and then dragged through the streets as people straddled its head like a Jet Ski.
These statues become such objects of derision not just because they serve as proxies for the fallen dictator and provide a chance to exact symbolic revenge. They also stand for neglect; they represent all of the resources and energy spent on glorifying the leader at the expense of the population. They are an insult because they express a set of priorities that subordinate the material needs of the populace to the psychological needs of the big man in charge. In Moscow, I once visited the Soviet-sculpture cemetery known, forlornly, as the Fallen Monument Park, a plot of grass filled with a bevy of Lenins facing in haphazard directions and a Stalin tipped over on his side. For all the storied ideals that sparked the Communist Revolution, this is why it died: It became a form of idolatry and forgot about the lives of people.
[Read: The real fight for the Smithsonian]
The prospect of a giant gilded Trump inevitably brings to mind a certain biblical story. While Moses was up on Mount Sinai receiving the tablets, the people of Israel grew restless and decided to melt down their jewelry and create a golden calf. They drank and danced around it like a bunch of crypto bros partying at Mar-a-Lago. When Moses came down and saw it all, he was appalled, as was God. The latter nearly exterminated the people he had only recently freed from slavery; the former came up with a milder punishment. Moses ground the statue into powder, mixed it with water, and made his people drink it. This, too, was an illustration of contrast. The big gold statue might be fun to pray to for a while, but if it smashes so easily, it’s probably hollow inside.