A standoff over a 15ft gold statue of President Trump has come to an end after months of its sculptor hiding the artwork in defiance of his patrons.
At 4pm last Wednesday, like a long-awaited ransom payment, a wire transfer came through and Alan Cottrill, an artist in Ohio, was ready to release the hostage. Or rather, to transport the giant gold Trump to a waiting plinth in Florida.
The so-called Don Colossus was loaded onto a flatbed truck and Cottrill and his team set out for the Trump National Doral, one of the president’s hotels and a golf club. “We had it wrapped up and shrouded like a mummy,” Cottrill said. “We stopped at a gas station in Georgia and fuelled up and a man walked up to it and said, ‘Is that the gold man?’”
Cottrill, 73, originally made the statue in bronze before Trump’s second inauguration, at the behest of a group of cryptocurrency investors who wanted to thank the president for his support for cryptocurrency and to celebrate his survival of an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
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Cottrill said he then discovered the investors were using the image of the sculpture to promote a cryptocurrency token, without paying him for the intellectual property rights. After suggesting that they return the statue to him so that it could be coated in gold leaf, he declared that he would not release it until he was paid in full.
His patrons disputed his account of their dealings, saying they had always planned to pay him before the statue was delivered. In February, Dustin Stockton, 44, one of the investors, accused Cottrill of “trying to squeeze us” for the money before installing the statue.
Cottrill said he had kept the work “in a rural outbuilding in the hills”. He felt sure that no one could take it from him: “I know the sheriff in this county. My little brother is a judge. In this county? Good luck.”
Earlier this month, as the standoff dragged on, Cottrill said he was contacted by the White House. Neither Trump nor his family were involved in the commissioning of the statue but Cottrill understood from Mark Burns, a pastor sometimes described as the president’s spiritual adviser, that the president was interested in his work.
The White House wanted to send someone to look at it, Cottrill said. “I told them, ‘Hey, look at the video, the pictures.’ But they wanted their representative to lay eyes on it. Someone told me I could have had all these pictures AI-generated.”
When the representative arrived, “I wanted to blindfold them to take them to the site”, Cottrill said. But he relented. “I thought it might scare them too much.”
Then, last Wednesday, he received a phone call that a wire transfer of $96,750 from the cryptocurrency investors was on its way. Cottrill and his team set off for Florida. Five minutes after they set off, “I got confirmation that the money had hit my account”.
They drove through the night and arrived at the Trump National Doral at 1.30pm the next day. The golf club was about to host a PGA Tour event so they needed to hurry. “It took a huge crane to lift it up,” he said. “A crew there built scaffolding around it going up 20ft. Then we had to cover it all in tarps. We had a lot of gold leaf patching to do. Any time you apply gold leaf you can’t even have a whisper of wind otherwise it blows the gold leaf out of your hand.”
Cottrill with the statue
The glue, to affix the gold leaf, usually takes about three hours to dry. To speed things up, they used a hair dryer. “By the time we got all the scaffolding down it was 4am,” Cottrill said.
It was a balmy morning. The first to see it were people staying at the golf course, out for morning jogs, he said. It got a few “Wows”, Cottrill said.
“It’s very tall and very gold,” Maverick McNealy, the professional golfer, told Golfweek.
Trump himself may see it this weekend, if he attends the tournament that runs until Sunday. Cottrill left his giant creation last Friday and drove back to Ohio, where he is finishing off a 7ft statue of President Garfield, which he expects to install with a lot less fuss a day before its unveiling in Mentor, Ohio, on July 4.
A life-sized version of the Trump statue stands on the street outside Cottrill’s studio in Zanesville. “It’s been defaced three times with paint,” he said. But it also gets admirers. “People pull up beside it,” he said. “Get their picture taken with it, jump back in the car.”