Donald Trump was revered as a living icon by many of his MAGA followers, though critics strongly dispute that he’s never done anything legendary.
A nine-foot bronze statue of the president installed at the Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach, Florida, was created by filmmaker Steven Barber. He dedicated the $300,000 monument to Trump, which depicts the president wearing his signature red tie that covers a gold-colored dress shirt.
The statue shows Trump, 79, holding a red MAGA hat in his left hand while with his right hand raised in the air, similar to his stance in the infamous image of him after being grazed in the ear from a shooting during a 2024 rally in Pennsylvania.
“This has nothing to do with politics,” Barber, 64, explained about the Trump replica. “This is a guy who took a bullet and jumped up and said, ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ An amazing energy came from that moment.”
Trump’s sculpture has become a tourist attraction and resurfaced in a recent photograph of two unidentified men on Jan. 13.
In the photograph, the smiling men are seen standing next to the statue, wearing traditional golf attire: polo shirts and shorts. The picture sparked a response from a Threads user who pointed out that the artists may have misrepresented Trump’s actual likeness.
“That is the ugliest statue I’ve ever seen,” one person posted in reaction to the “Trump Defiance Monument” statue on display in Palm Beach.
View on Threads
A few noted that the statue was a drastic difference from how Trump looks in real life.
“Notice he looks 50 pounds less than he really is,” a second person wrote, while another said, “Of course, the statue is thinner. Bwahaha. This looks like the meeting of the little mushrooms.”
Another commenter took aim at Trump’s well-known vanity, threads, “Because of course he has a statue of himself at his club.”
Others were less subtle. One person questioned what kind of narcissist would commission a statue of themselves for supporters to admire, while another said, “I’m embarrassed” for the golfers pictured nearby.
Still, Trump remained the main target. One critic predicted the statue’s fate bluntly expressing, “That s–t will be melted down along with all his other trinkets…the Oval Office looks hideous, gold vomit… all over the place.”
The commander-in-chief has stamped his personal aesthetic all over the White House since being inaugurated as the U.S. president for a second, nonconsecutive time in January 2025. In particular, he transformed the Oval Office into a gold-filled recreation of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.
Trump also paved over the historic White House Rose Garden to set up a patio for his so-called “Rose Garden Club,” again borrowing from his Mar-a-Lago decor. His most controversial renovation was demolishing the White House’s East Wing to build an estimated $400 million ballroom on the complex.
Fox News personality Jesse Watters revealed the supposedly privately funded event space is another example of Trump’s narcissistic nature. Watters, 47, recalled the president privately telling him that the ballroom is being built as “a monument to myself, because no one else will.”
The self-aggrandizing behavior did not end with just the remodeling of the White House grounds. Trump also paid tribute to himself by putting up numerous portraits of himself in the building’s interior while moving paintings of other former presidents further from public view.
As the present American commander in chief continues to promote grandiose shrines to satisfy his own oversized ego, two adult men embracing a photo-op opportunity with a fake version of Trump feeds the notion that the billionaire has a cult-like grip on his diehard supporters that does not seem to be waning.
“I’m a conservative. I’m a Republican. I love this country,” Barber said when speaking about the “Trump Defiance Monument” statue. “Trump does a lot of f―d up s―t, but he does more good than bad. And compared to the last guy, he’s Jesus Christ incarnate.”
