Donald Trump is a monuments guy. While his constituents (the American citizenry) bear up cheerfully and patriotically through economic hard times, he’s conscientiously devoted himself to erecting monumental structures to ensure he’ll be remembered. There’s the White House ballroom, dwarfing the White House itself. There’s the Arc de Trump he wants to build on the Virginia side of D.C.’s Memorial Bridge. (The Lincoln Memorial is on the D.C. side.) And there’s the gold framing with which he’s adorned every stationary White House object.
His followers are scurrying to create physically durable Trump tributes of their own. Trump’s man at the U.S. Treasury has released drawings of a commemorative $1 coin with Trump’s head on both sides, to be minted on the taxpayer’s dime to commemorate the 250th anniversary of 1776. Federal law forbids the placement of the image of a living or sitting president on coins and currency, but federal law ain’t what it used to be. (See, e.g., the current Supreme Court.) Republican members of Congress have introduced bills directing taxpayers’ additional dimes to projects placing Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore and on $250 bills (see “federal law,” above), to renaming Dulles International Airport and the Kennedy Center after Trump, as well as naming the D.C. Metro system (though not any specific train lines) after him, too. Responsive as ever to sound judgment, Trump has already endorsed the authors of two of those bills for 2026 re-election.
Trump has occasionally opined that his near-miss escape from assassination during the 2024 campaign was an act of God, of divine intervention, of perhaps even divine anointment, a sentiment echoed by a number of clerics. My proposal for a Trump monument is, I believe, the first to combine aspects of all these tributes and devotional creeds.
It entails building a large golden calf, like the one in the Book of Exodus and Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 film The Ten Commandments, but substituting Trump’s head for the calf’s. For those of you unfamiliar with either Exodus or DeMille’s potboiler, which stars Charlton Heston as Moses, the Golden Calf was built by the Israelites during an interval in their flight from Egypt. Moses had climbed Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments on tablets carved by God Himself, and was gone so long that the people, still stranded in the desert, had despaired of ever seeing Moses again and of the power of his god, and thought to create a new deity for themselves. Melting down their gold earrings, they shaped it into a sculpture of a calf, mounted it on a pedestal, worshiped it, and then had themselves one helluva dance party. (DeMille had a thing for helluva dance parties.) Moses then returned to witness this heretical idolatry and idolatrous heresy, dashed the tablets to the ground in a fury, called the remaining faithful to his side, and ordered the partygoers slain and plunged into the pit of perdition (which does open up and swallow them in DeMille’s epic).
So, a large-scale adaptation of this story to current conditions would require more than just the Trumpified Golden Calf. Ideally, it would also feature prominent Trumpist idolators bowing and prostrating themselves to it: Among those coming to mind would be JD Vance, Mike Johnson, Jeff Bezos, Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, countless prelates (disproportionately but not entirely evangelical Christians) who’ve called Trump divinely anointed—you get the picture. And above them all, off to one side, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, the Lincoln of Gettysburg—you get the picture here, too—hurling down the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution upon these heretics, with—ideally, of course—something like a trapdoor that opens and swallows them all up en route to hell. (And then restores them to their initial positions so they can plunge yet again for the next tranche of visiting art lovers.)
I can’t imagine there being more than one large-scale monument with all, or even most, of those features. (By “large-scale,” I have in mind the bull sculpture on Wall Street.) And while the cost of such a Trump-calf made entirely of gold would be prohibitive, we know Trump’s a fan of gold plating, so gold plating it would be. The entire ensemble would require a good deal of space, and since I doubt a permit for placement on the National Mall would be issued, some private plot of land around D.C. would be the next best, probably protected by private guards from the threat of MAGA’s cancel-culture goons. There’s a team of political artists around D.C. who’ve been making and displaying Trump critiques—as I write, their statue of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein holding hands is on display outside a D.C. café-and-bookstore—though the Trump-calf would likely require a more multimedia team of artists. And the entire project, done to appropriate scale, would also likely require a quick endowment from one or more patriotic patrons of the arts.
That shouldn’t deter patriotic entrepreneurs from producing and marketing mini Trump-calves, too, possibly small enough to be held in one’s hand.
Such a project, I believe, might not only bolster Americans’ faith in democracy, but also call to mind the biblical lessons about the consequences of worshipping false gods. As The Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim noted in July, “the point of the Exodus story isn’t to analyze the psychology of dictators. But the Bible’s histories often reveal patterns of human behavior so recognizable as to seem ripped from yesterday’s headlines.”
In any event, that’s my art project proposal for the Age of Trump. Any takers?