I’m all alone on the hypersaturated fairways of Trump National Doral Miami—flush green in this sickening, unreal way, like the sheer rolling hills of the Windows XP wallpaper. I’m wandering up and down cobbled pathways, flitting between the stately driving range and shaved putting greens, dodging rolling golf carts of men in pastel chinos and white visors on their way toward $695 tee times—or just $595 if they wait for what the hotel describes as a “twilight round.” I pass by coral-toned Gothic Revival water fountains blooming with stone cherubs and press my feet into doormats stamped with the regal Trump family crest, immaculately vacuumed until not a mote of lint is visible. Tchotchkes and totems touting the president’s grandeur sprinkle the echoing corridors, while a gift shop overflows with Donald Trump polo shirts, Trump playing cards, and Trump crystalware. It is 90 degrees, I am pouring sweat, and for the life of me, I can’t find the one thing I came here to see: a 22-foot gold-leaf statue of the sitting president, installed on the property this spring.
The statue is perhaps the most brazen expression of Trump’s one-of-a-kind hubris, and if you consider the record, that’s really saying something. It was erected during the final week of April, when one of Trump Doral’s four golf courses—the Blue Monster, famous for its punishing water hazards—hosted the PGA Championship. Dubbed Don Colossus, the statue depicts the president on that fateful afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania, moments after surviving what would turn out to be the first of many attempts on his life. Golden Trump holds his right fist aloft in triumph, flexing a body that has been rendered trimmer and more muscular than its corporeal counterpart, pudge hemmed in, jawline sharpened, gaze steelier. The whole project was privately bankrolled by—what else?—an anonymous cryptocurrency group behind a meme coin called $PATRIOT.
Despite the churning pace of Trump-era scandals, when stories are lucky to survive more than an hour’s worth of attention, Don Colossus has become an enduring fascination within liberal media. The statue embodies the president’s defiant conceit at the same moment his administration has taken on a decidedly late-Romanov odor, and that has made it a useful heuristic to articulate how it feels to be alive right now. Trump is beset with tanking approval ratings and skyrocketing gas prices, both of which are the result of an Iranian intervention that will be remembered as the man’s most damaging political blunder. Moments like this usually find presidents crouched in defense or sketching out a retreat, but Trump has never been capable of such an inclination—that statue was going up no matter the headwinds. On May 6, a gaggle of religious leaders, led by Pastor Mark Burns, a televangelist, thrice-failed congressional candidate, and board member for an entity called Pastors for Trump, flocked to Doral to consecrate the statue.
It is unusual for a pastor to wreath a sculpture of a mortal with divine favor, and Burns grew oddly curdled about that fact: “Let me be clear: This is not a golden calf,” he wrote on X, hours after the dedication. “This statue is a celebration of life. It is a symbol of resilience, freedom, patriotism, strength, and the willpower to keep fighting for the future of America.”
I do not envy anyone who has found themselves in a position where they feel the need to preemptively head off charges of idolatry. But Trump certainly savored the ovation. Partway through his spiel, Burns activated the speaker on his iPhone and held it to the microphone so the president could address the crowd.
“I want to thank everybody there,” Trump said. “I know it was done from love.”
It has been 10 long years since Trumpism broke containment. We have watched it ooze like an open wound from grotesque wellsprings in Atlantic City and South Florida out into the wider world, inverting reality and achieving previously unthinkable degrees of normalization—to the point that nobody bats an eye at, say, a UFC octagon propped up on the White House lawn. A number of morbid curiosities had convinced me to drive three and a half hours from Tampa to Doral: I wanted to meet the sorts of people who might add a golden Trump statue to their sightseeing itineraries, I hold an enduring desire for my face to be rubbed in brutal defeats, and I always, always savor the thrill of being somewhere I’m not supposed to be. But mostly, I wanted to visit the vanishing point of our ongoing nationwide crackup.
That is, if I could only find the damn thing.
You know those wool pockets that pro players sheathe over their golf clubs? Those are called headcovers, and at Trump Doral, you can purchase ones made to look like the president’s disembodied head—complete with characteristic shaggy, white-blond mane bobbing over his brow—an image that conjures up that one orc from Lord of the Rings more than conveys a symbol of Republican allegiance. But I digress. I was in one of two equipment shops at Trump National Doral Miami not because I was in the market for Trump-branded golf balls—I was looking for directions. I brought a tall, thin Diet Coke to the counter—a perfectly Trumpian olive branch if ever there was one—and asked the clerk where I could find Don Colossus. He told me to hang a right and follow the pathway down the hill. The Coke cost $4.
“You won’t miss the statue,” the clerk said, the slightest tang of exasperation in his tone. “It’s hard to miss.”
And finally, after taking that right, there it was. You see the fist before anything else, glowing in the hot Florida sun. After you take a few more paces down the hill, the whole shebang comes into view. Don Colossus stands proud atop a stone pedestal, keeping vigil over a small commemorative plaque. (“In honor of president Donald J. Trump and his unrelenting fight to Make America Great Again!,” it reads.) There is no mention of the $PATRIOT coin, or of cryptocurrency in general; instead, the plaque announces that the statue was funded by “Freedom Loving Patriots.” To my mild surprise, there were no dyed-in-the-wool MAGA partisans snapping selfies, holding salutes, or—who knows?—dropping to their knees in prayer. I was the only person there, save for a bored young woman selling Fireball shots at a bar opposite the statue and four Spanish-speaking day laborers hard at work planting a band of shrubbery around the installation’s base. (They shrugged off my request for an interview. I can’t really blame them.)
I probably don’t need to tell you that Don Colossus is ugly. That it is chintzy and flagrantly silly, and that, even compared with the gaudy, nouveau riche texture of the overarching Trump brand—defined by an uncouth blend of counterfeit royal pastiche and Northeastern golf culture—it sticks out like a sore thumb. But that has always been the point. MAGAdom favors the garish and gross, and it got exactly what it hoped for here. Despite the statue being covered entirely in gold, the production looks conspicuously cheap. It was created by Ohio-based sculptor Alan Cottrill, who has modeled a number of eclectic Americans over the years. (His renderings of both Jesse Owens and football coach Woody Hayes dot the Ohio State campus.) Cottrill billed $PATRIOT only $450,000 for the project, which sounded a little soft to me. Remember, it’s gold leaf: Below the gilding, the rest of the figure is made of bronze. Don’s suit is indented with billowing wrinkles, perhaps to suggest the idea of movement, as if the colossus is soaring through the air. And what did Cottrill do to his face, which looks nothing like the moldering soon-to-be-octogenarian we’ve come to know so well? This statue yassifies Trump, sucking out his buccal fat, virilizing his features, carefully excising all of the dainty feyness that, whether he likes it or not, is crucial to capturing the unique Trump disposition. It is probably the most personally flattering work of presidential art ever commissioned. I mean, even in Washington Crossing the Delaware, Emanuel Leutze painted the Founding Father with a small paunch.
It is clear that I am the only person at Trump Doral who has taken an acute interest in Don Colossus. There are other people around, yes, but they pass unmoved by his golden visage. The desire to play golf transcends the desire to declare fealty—to sanctify the president in the way that Burns, the pastor, did—and in that sense, that makes the statue functionally identical to the many other portraits of the president decking the halls of the resort. If you come to a Trump property, you expect to be fully enmeshed within the man’s starved ego—I saw one that was done on black velvet, for example. Elsewhere, glass cases display his “Never Surrender” high-tops. American life has become suffused with the results of his self-aggrandizement. Stand back and absorb the piercing shimmer of a 22-foot Trump statue, and, more than any other emotional impulse, you will feel unfazed.
And frankly, I think that’s exactly what Trump hopes to achieve, with this statue and everything else, as the finish line comes into view. Someday in the near or distant future, it is likely that the American populace will be eager to leave the Trump years in the dustbin of history. As he approaches the second half of his second presidency, with his 80th birthday hanging overhead, the man himself seems to be aware of that truth—and is doing everything within his power to refuse the people the privilege of ever forgetting him. With the enveloping twilight pervading his mind, all the president is concerned about is legacy—but given his lifelong vulgarian tendencies, that legacy can be secured only with big buildings embossed with gold letters. This is how I must interpret Trump’s fidgety desire to chisel his name onto the nation’s most vaunted marble sanctums in D.C. and elsewhere; those belonging to the Kennedy Center, Penn Station, Dulles International. At press briefings he grows increasingly somnolent when asked to address any topic that isn’t the supersized neoclassical ballroom currently under construction atop the rubble of the White House East Wing. The vainglorious projects of the late Trump period have been foisted upon the public with anxious speed, almost as if the president is checking off a bucket list of bad taste.
Other canonizations are more ethereal in nature and appear to be designed to graft a smirking, idiotic MAGA sensibility into the deep, intractable workings of statecraft. I am reminded of that whole Gulf of America business, which allowed the administration to browbeat domestic airlines into geographical revisions of their in-flight maps. Or the repeated threats to annex Greenland—last week, Trump posted an image of his face superimposed over the svelte Nordic homes peppering the country’s southern coast. It is imperative for any president to keep their eyes on the horizon, but Trump is fulfilling that duty with an unparalleled myopic intention. Did you even remember that Trump is championing a baroque, 250-foot-tall arch to be placed on the National Mall? If constructed, it will be topped with gilded bald eagles and an angelic Lady Liberty; its speckless white-marble columns will be wide enough to obstruct sight lines to the Lincoln Memorial.
That, to me, is the Trump doctrine in miniature. Even if the tides turn, and whatever dark bewitchment mercifully releases the American public—permanently unmasking MAGAdom as a farce and a scam, much to the catharsis of long-embattled liberals—Trump’s madcap terraforming campaign will make his memory stubbornly difficult to purge from the civic infrastructure of our nation. Even after our planet is rendered a searing, inhospitable desert, galaxy-bestriding antiquarians may yet still set foot upon the wasteland that was once North America and spot a golden fist protruding from what was once Trump National Doral Miami.
I end my visit to Trump Doral sitting on a stool upholstered with burgundy leather and dark oak at Champions Bar and Grill, the central social club on the Trump Doral campus. The AC is a welcome relief, as is the Tanqueray gin and soda I’m sipping alongside a porcelain dish of mixed nuts. (The bartender asks me if I have any allergies before plopping them down.) Next to me, a golfer revs up for a round on the links by ordering a double scotch. He pulls something out of his pocket; it’s a plastic-wrapped six-pack of Zyn. At the other end of the bar slouches a man in his late 60s, with a MAGA hat resting deep on his brow. He nurses a drink for a while, before producing a humongous iPad. He thumbs the volume to the highest it can possibly go and clicks on a video of Donald Trump. The president is extolling the virtues of the East Wing ballroom.
Am I allowed to say that I’ve enjoyed my time here? Or, at the very least, that it gives me a glimpse of a happier American story if the narrative had broken differently? Across the board, the staff is genial and preternaturally accommodating. The valets in the lobby summon golf carts with a flick of the wrist, graciously driving me back and forth from the parking lot. The hostess working the front desk at the bar compliments my hair, which, to be honest, is in desperate need of a cut. (“Very nice,” she says through broken English. “Better than woman.”) The grounds are luxe and cheerfully corny, with earth-toned Mediterranean walls and Spanish-tile roofs, reminiscent of the foppish princeling Trump once fashioned himself to be. In happier days—in a saner timeline—I could have played a round here.
That’s because Trump Doral encapsulates the last vestiges of the Trump empire before politics intervened, the version of the man who tried to balm the yawning void at the center of his life with big casinos and wide-open fairways rather than the levers of the presidency. In that universe, Trump’s meretriciousness was almost charming: a story of a graceless man who genuinely believed that with enough curlicues and flourishes, he could re-create esteemed European gravitas in South Florida. The massive golden statue would no longer represent a debased partnership between decentralized crypto cartels and Christian fundamentalism—it would be yet another gaudy filigree from a wealthy man who found his life’s purpose in his own solipsism. If only that were all he ever needed.
