It was gone just a day after it appeared: a statue of President Donald Trump holding a hole-ridden golden dome like an umbrella as mini-missiles rained on him from above.
The statue, unveiled Wednesday on the National Mall in Washington, mocked Trump’s “Golden Dome” project, a missile defense system he announced last year. Trump said the project would be completed by the end of his term and cost $175 billion, but defense and budget analysts say it’s more likely to take at least a decade to complete and cost at least a trillion dollars. The statue is the latest art piece erected in Washington in protest of the Trump administration.
“So many people come to visit our nation’s capital, and it’s really good to educate them about the reality of what our government is doing,” said John Bauer, one of two artists who built the statue.
By Thursday morning, in a cloudy and brisk Washington, Bauer, 68, began taking the statue down. The National Park Service had granted a 48-hour permit for the statue, but Bauer decided to take the structure down early because of the weather. “It’s a lot faster coming down than it is going up,” said Bauer, who started designing the statue in January.
Plaques surrounding the statue warned that the Golden Dome could spark an arms race. “It would prompt adversaries to build more offensive missiles, specifically to overwhelm defenses and target US military satellites. An arms race is a race to the bottom. It saps money from the stuff people really need,” the description read.
Bauer likened Trump’s Golden Dome proposal to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which critics dubbed “Star Wars.” “It was proven not to work then. It doesn’t work now,” said Bauer, who is based in Burlington, Vermont.
The White House, when asked about the statue, sent an emailed statement. “Trump Derangement Syndrome is a sick and incurable disease that has rotted the brains of many people. President Trump will never waver in fighting for and protecting the American people,” reads the statement from White House spokesperson Davis Ingle.
The project was spearheaded by Ben Cohen, the activist of Ben & Jerry’s fame who last year launched the Up in Arms campaign, which takes aim at the Pentagon’s steep budget.
“You’ve heard about the guy talking about the Golden Dome. Well, he had it wrong. It’s really a hole-den dome. That’s right, lots of holes in the dude’s golden dome,” Cohen said in a video promoting the project.
Jennifer Hill and her daughter, Ginger, while visiting Washington from just outside Richmond, went to the site Thursday morning. They said they saw the statue on the news Wednesday evening and wanted to see it in person.
“I love getting to just be able to see people enact their rights. These are things that we can’t have taken away. That’s the glory of living in the U.S. You have the ability to state your opinion. And I love being able to just see that,” said Ginger, an 18-year-old senior in high school.
Jennifer said she didn’t like that the statue mocked the president. “At the same token, we have the freedom of speech to be able to critique his policies and what he’s trying to do, so it’s a beautiful thing in so many ways,” she said.
The Golden Dome statue is the latest in a slew of statues taking aim at Trump and his administration.
On Monday, a toilet that was spray-painted gold and set on a faux-marble pedestal was installed on the promenade in front of the Lincoln Memorial. A plaque on each side of the structure reads: “A Throne Fit for a King.”
The toilet was created by the guerrilla art group Secret Handshake, which has installed about a dozen statues and other works on the National Mall over the past 16 months that have criticized Trump and his supporters.
In March, the art group installed a statue depicting the president embracing the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in a reenactment of an iconic scene from the movie “Titanic.” In September, the group installed a spray-painted bronze statue titled “Best Friends Forever” that showed Trump and Epstein holding hands.
Brandon Orr, 34, said he thought the latest Trump statue was “hilarious” because of how it made fun of the president’s Golden Dome. “Everything he does is just kind of absurd. I don’t think he thinks anything through,” said Orr, who lives in Washington and works in health care.
Orr said he thinks art is an impactful form of protest because it can catch people’s attention. “Art has always been a protest. It’s how people get their voice out,” he said.
Bauer agreed. “You’d be amazed at how much attention it draws,” he said, adding that the statue would be stored in the area for a potential redeployment. “Hopefully we can put it back up again.”
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