A 15-foot-tall gold-leafed bronze statue of Donald Trump, titled "Don Colossus," was unveiled at his National Doral golf club in Miami, Florida, ahead of the G20 summit. The statue, funded by $450,000 raised by cryptocurrency moguls and sculpted by Alan Cottrill (founder of Four Star Pizza), depicts Trump raising a triumphant fist with a plaque reading "FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT!" The unveiling was organized by televangelist Mark Burns of "Pastors for Trump," who posted that the statue was "not a golden calf," and was attended by evangelical Christian leaders and reportedly some Hassidic rabbis.
The article argues that the statue represents a form of idolatry more akin to a Moloch idol than the biblical Golden Calf, criticizing Trump's increasingly heretical pronouncements and his evangelical supporters' willingness to overlook obvious sacrilege. It contextualizes the statue within Trump's pattern of religious provocations, including threatening Iran on Easter Sunday with a sarcastic "Praise be to Allah," sharing an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, and attacking Pope Leo XIV. The piece matters because it highlights the intersection of political power, religious hypocrisy, and the use of art as propaganda in contemporary American culture.