The White House has issued a scathing response to a statue erected on the National Mall to protest President Donald Trump’s military birthday parade.
Titled “Dictator Approved,” the 8-foot-tall sculpture features a gold-painted hand giving a thumbs up while crushing the Statue of Liberty’s verdigris crown. Its base is decorated with four plaques highlighting quotes from authoritarian leaders praising Trump.
According to a permit for the installation issued by the National Park Service, the piece was meant as a rebuke to Trump’s June 14 parade celebrating the Army’s 250th anniversary—which coincided with Trump’s 79th birthday, The Washington Post reported.
The parade “feature[ed] imagery similar to autocratic, oppressive regimes” like North Korea, Russia, and China, the statue’s creators—who so far haven’t been identified—wrote in the application.
“If these Democrat activists were living in a dictatorship, their eye-sore of a sculpture wouldn’t be sitting on the National Mall right now,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, wrote to the Post an emailed statement.
“In the United States of America you have the freedom to display your so-called ‘art,’ no matter how ugly it is,” she added.
The plaques on the base quote Russian President Vladimir Putin saying, “President Trump is a very bright and talented man,” and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban saying, “The most respected, the most feared person is Donald Trump.”
A glowing quote from former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro says, “We do have a great deal of shared values. I admire President Trump.” And North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is quoted as saying the phrases, “Your excellency,” “A ‘special relationship” and, “The extraordinary courage of President Trump.”
The statue can stay up through Sunday, according to the National Parks Service permit.
The style and materials used are similar to protest artworks put up around Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, Oregon, and New York last fall.
One of those pieces depicted a pile of poop left on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)’s desk in mock “tribute” to the Jan. 6 rioters who stormed and defiled the Capitol building in an attempt to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat.
Trump’s $45 million military parade drew thin crowds and was poorly attended even by Republicans, though the president declared it a “tremendous success.”
Critics accused the president—who insisted on having tanks rolling through the streets of D.C.—of staging a Soviet-style event and using the troops as political pawns.
The event coincided with millions of Americans protesting his administration at “No Kings” rallies nationwide.
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