Gold is heavy, and not just literally. A 15-foot bronze statue covered in gold leaf, standing on a seven-foot pedestal at a presidential golf resort just outside Miami, has a way of making things feel weighty in more ways than one. The kind of installation that stops a PGA Tour golfer mid-practice round and prompts him to tell a reporter, simply: “It’s big and gold.”
That was Rickie Fowler’s assessment of “Don Colossus,” the now-famous golden effigy of President Donald Trump that was installed at Trump National Doral Miami in late April 2026, just days before the course hosted the PGA Tour’s Cadillac Championship. Fowler, to his credit, kept it short. Others have been considerably more verbose. Pastors have blessed it, late-night hosts have mocked it, critics have reached for the Book of Exodus, and Trump himself called in by phone to praise it. Not a bad first week for a statue that spent months locked in a sculptor’s barn in rural Ohio.
The story of how “Don Colossus” made it from Zanesville, Ohio, to the fairways of Doral involves cryptocurrency, a copyright dispute, a mysterious anonymous donor, and the kind of chaotic energy that has come to define so much of Trump-era America. Depending on your politics, it’s either a testament to patriotic devotion or the most on-brand thing that has ever happened. Possibly both.
The Statue, From the Beginning
The work was commissioned in August 2024 by the cryptocurrency group $PATRIOT, which spent $300,000 on the bronze sculpture and an additional $60,000 on the gold coating. The artist they hired was Alan Cottrill, 73 years old, with a studio in Zanesville, Ohio.
Made of bronze and coated with gold leaf, the statue depicts Trump raising his fist in the iconic gesture he made seconds after a bullet grazed his right ear during the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. Placed on a custom-designed pedestal seven feet tall, the figure reaches a total height of 22 feet and visually dominates the golf courses of the resort from its prominent position. The pedestal alone weighs about 7,000 pounds, and the bronze figure atop it clocks in at 3.1 tons.
To be clear, and Cottrill himself made this point when Trump excitedly posted about “GOLD” on Truth Social: it is not solid gold. It is bronze, finished with a layer of gold leaf. The sculptor told the Miami New Times, pointedly, that it’s “just a normal bronze statue with a coating of gold leaf over the entire thing.”
The Road to Doral Was Not a Smooth One
The $PATRIOT memecoin – a type of cryptocurrency with little practical function beyond speculating on celebrity hype – went on sale in late 2024, garnering significant interest among Trump’s fans as he swept the presidential election that month. Its momentum was swiftly undercut by Trump launching his own cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, just days before the January inauguration. $PATRIOT’s value tanked as $TRUMP’s rose, and the coin ended up more than 95 percent off its peak.
The payment disputes were just as messy. While the statue was being built, Cottrill clashed with the crypto group after claiming he was owed money for intellectual property rights – specifically, the use of his design for marketing purposes. He held the statue in an undisclosed location in Muskingum County, east of Columbus, until full payment was received. The phrase he used to describe the whole experience – “flaky as hell from the start” – gives you the general picture.
Once the parties came to terms, Cottrill drove the statue from Ohio to Miami on a flatbed trailer and installed it on a pedestal overlooking the resort’s golf courses. The final payment, according to the Miami New Times, came in on April 22, followed immediately by a call telling Cottrill he had to have the statue installed by dawn the next morning. He and his foundry manager worked through the night until 4 a.m., then drove 18 hours straight back to Zanesville.
The Dedication Ceremony
The formal dedication of the statue took place on May 6, 2026, at Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami, led by evangelical pastor Mark Burns. A plaque in the grass at the base of the statue reads: “In honor of President Donald J. Trump and his unrelenting fight to Make America Great Again.”
Trump himself called in to the event, with Burns holding a phone up to a microphone so the crowd could hear the president. On Truth Social the following day, Trump posted a photo of the statue, calling it “The Real Deal – GOLD – At Doral in Miami. Put there by great American Patriots!!!”
Burns, an evangelical minister and spiritual adviser to the president, insisted the likeness represented “gratitude, honor and remembrance” rather than deification. He was responding, in part, to a wave of criticism that drew on a very specific biblical reference. A meme spread widely on Facebook comparing the statue to the golden calf, a reference to the biblical story of the Israelites who escaped Egypt and created an idol of a golden calf in Moses’ absence. Burns pushed back firmly: “We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone. This statue is not about worship. It is about honor.”
Not everyone at the dedication was a true believer in the monument, even among those in attendance. When a tournament photographer asked a few Tour staff members if they wanted a group photo by the statue, he received a collective, “No.”
The Crypto Angle Nobody Quite Saw Coming
The people who paid for “Don Colossus” had much bigger ambitions than a statue at a golf course. The $PATRIOT memecoin was built around the idea that the statue’s viral presence would drive up demand for the token. But the excitement didn’t last, and the token’s price collapsed, losing over 90 percent of its value within months, marred by delays and infighting among the investors. Trump then launched his own competing $TRUMP coin, which accelerated PATRIOT’s slide.
Before the dust settled on any of that, the Trump family tried to distance itself from the whole venture. Eric Trump wrote publicly on X: “The Trump Organization has no association of any kind with the Patriot Token or meme coin ($PATRIOT) referenced below. We appreciate the support and enthusiasm, but we want to be crystal clear – we are not involved in this coin.” That statement came even as the president himself had earlier privately told Pastor Burns the statue “LOOKS FANTASTIC,” according to reporting in the New York Times.
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, a former child actor and co-founder of Tether, was photographed helping unveil the 22-foot monument. Pierce’s presence added another layer of controversy to an event that had no shortage of them.
The sculptor, for his part, made clear he had learned his lesson. When asked whether he would work with the $PATRIOT crew again on any future project, including the planned Trump presidential library, Cottrill’s answer was brief, emphatic, and unrepeatable in a family publication.
A Backdrop for What Comes Next
The statue’s presence at Doral carries a timing that goes well beyond the Cadillac Championship. The 2026 G20 Miami Summit is planned for December 14 to 15, 2026, and will be held at Trump National Doral Miami.
That means the leaders of the world’s largest economies will be arriving at a golf resort with a 22-foot gold-leafed statue of the host nation’s president staring down at them from the ninth tee. The United States intends to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to the summit, though the invitation has not yet been formally sent. Whether Putin attends or not, the visual is already written.
“Don Colossus” is not the first golden statue of Trump: a smaller golden figure of the then-former president was already displayed at the 2021 CPAC in Orlando. In March 2026, Trump also unveiled an AI-generated video related to his future presidential library, which showed two gold statues of Trump. As New York magazine’s Margaret Hartmann observed drily: “It says a lot about our current president that in response to the news that a giant gold statue of Donald Trump was dedicated this week, you have to ask, ‘Which one?'”
The Quiet Part
A group of crypto investors spent the better part of two years commissioning a golden likeness of a sitting U.S. president, used images of it without the artist’s permission to sell a speculative digital token, watched the token lose nearly all of its value, got into a protracted payment dispute with the Ohio sculptor who had essentially held the thing hostage in a barn, then had the bill partly settled before the statue was loaded onto a flatbed truck and driven more than 1,100 miles to a golf course where it now overlooks a PGA Tour event and will soon greet the assembled leaders of the world’s twenty largest economies.
That sequence of events is not a satire. It actually happened. And the president praised it warmly.
Whether “Don Colossus” is a monument to devotion, a monument to excess, or a monument to the collision of money, celebrity, and politics in 2026 depends a great deal on where you’re standing. What’s harder to argue with is that it is, by any measure, a very large gold statue. And it’s not going anywhere, at least not while the G20 is on the calendar.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.