Pedestrians look at a statue of Donald Trump behind Gerhard Marcks’ sculpture Maja, in Maja Park in Philidelphia.
Caroline Gutman/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Divisive statues mocking former President Donald Trump aren’t just sprouting up in Washington, D.C.: Similar structures have spread to other cities in recent days.
Last week, two bronze-colored statues caused a stir when they abruptly appeared in the nation’s capital.
First, a replica of former House Speaker Nancy Peloi’s desk, defaced with a pile of poop, was plopped within view of the U.S. Capitol. Its plaque explains that it honors the “brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election.”
Then, over the weekend, a plaza near the White House suddenly became host to a tall sculpture of a hand gripping a tiki torch, reminiscent of the torches that white supremacists held at the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally. Its plaque dedicates it to “Trump and the ‘very fine people’ he boldly stood to defend when they marched in Charlottesville, Virginia.”
As it turns out, two other satirical statues briefly popped up in Philadelphia and Portland, Ore., around the same time.
Both feature a life-sized model of a suit-clad Trump, were placed near an existing statue of a woman and are titled In Honor of a Lifetime of Sexual Assault. It shows him with a closed-mouth smile and one hand curled in what could be interpreted as a suggestive gesture.
The plaques also quote from the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape, in which a hot mic captured him telling then-host Billy Bush about kissing women and grabbing them between their legs without permission, in crude terms.
“[W]hen you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” Trump said in the clip, which surfaced a month before the 2016 election. It earned him much criticism but didn’t keep him out of the White House.
Dozens of women have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct dating back as far as the 1970s, which he has denied.
Former Sports Illustrated model Stacey Williams became the latest to accuse Trump of inappropriate sexual behavior last week, alleging he groped her in 1993 while Jeffrey Epstein, who was later convicted of sex offenses, looked on. Another, writer E. Jean Carroll, sued Trump twice for defamation after he denied sexually abusing her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in 1996 — for which a jury found him liable in 2023.
The Trump statue appeared on a Portland sidewalk on Sunday, an arm’s length away from a sculpture of a nude woman that has been there since 1975.
That sculpture, Kvinneakt (“nude woman” in Norwegian), has its own storied history: It was featured in the “Expose Yourself to Art” poster in the 1970s, which showed future Portland Mayor Bud Clark flashing the woman in a raincoat.
Decades later, the figure of Trump towering over the woman, with the two statues’ bases touching, made for a strikingly similar image. But it didn’t last long.
The Trump statue was beheaded by mid-afternoon, according to KOIN, and passersby dismantled it piece by piece throughout the day until “all that was left was one golden shoe.”
At least one of the culprits was Portland City Council candidate and self-described “fearless Trump supporter” Brandon Farley.
Farley tweeted a video of himself arriving at the scene of the already-headless statue and chipping away at what he described as the “slanderous plaque,” eventually tearing it off completely.
The second Trump statue was similarly short-lived.
It arrived in Philadelphia’s Maja Park on Wednesday, according to BillyPenn at WHYY. It was placed about 15 feet behind, and facing, Maja, a statue of a nude woman with her eyes closed and arms above her head.
The Maja was sculpted by German artist Gerhard Marcks in the 1940s, and installed in the park in 2021.
City workers took the Trump statue down and put it into a pickup truck before noon, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
It’s not clear if the same artist or artists are behind all four installations. But the style of the bronze sculptures and the tone and font of their accompanying plaques look nearly identical.
The D.C. sculptures are intended to “express the principles of democracy justice and freedom,” a group called Civic Crafted LLC wrote in its request to display them in D.C. The National Park Service granted them a permit to display the torch until Thursday, and the desk until next Wednesday — the day after Election Day.
