In a foundry in the hills of Ohio lies a colossal bronze statue of President Trump that was recently coated in gold on the orders of a consortium of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs.
It is a work of art by the sculptor Alan Cottrill showing Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, standing and punching the air moments after he survived a would-be-assassin’s bullet.
It is also a hostage.
“They said: ‘Oh don’t worry Alan, we’ll pay you, we’ll pay you,’” Cottrill said of his patrons, a group of 16 cryptocurrency enthusiasts who commissioned the statue to honour President Trump.
But just as Michelangelo sometimes found himself funding the redecoration of the Sistine Chapel, Cottrill feels he has been carrying the cost of an enormous sculpture of Trump.
Alan Cottrill in his foundry
RYAN SCOTT FOR THE TIMES
Cottrill originally made the 18ft bronze before Trump’s second inauguration. In December it received a modification: a layer of 23.75 carat gold leaf, applied in his foundry.
It has cost him any amount of trouble. Just finding a gold-leaf expert who was willing to work on a Trump statue proved harder than expected, and now the colossus lies taking up space in his foundry while his patrons arrange for an unveiling by the president at his Doral golf resort in Florida.
“What they owe me is $91,200,” he said on Tuesday. “They know it’s not leaving until they pay me.”
Dustin Stockton, 44, one of his patrons, declined to discuss the giant Trump statue with its new skin of gold, which the cryptocurrency entrepreneurs had hoped to keep under wraps until a suitable occasion was agreed for the president to unveil it himself.
“The deal was we would pay whatever the final outstanding bill was before the statue leaves for its final destination at Doral,” he said. “He’s trying to squeeze us for it right now.”
Cottrill, 73, has made bronzes of 16 past presidents and a Thomas Edison that stands in Statuary Hall in the Capitol. In August 2024 he received a call from a sculptor in Las Vegas who said: “Hey, do you want to do a 15ft Trump statue?”
He was put in touch by phone with a group of 16 cryptocurrency entrepreneurs — one in Canada, the others mostly in the United States — who wanted to create a giant bronze Trump commemorating his survival of the assassination attempt at Butler.
“It was a turning point in world history,” Stockton told The Times in 2025. “It would have been a full-blown civil war.” They wanted to capture “one of the most iconic moments and to show our appreciation of his embrace of crypto”, he said.
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The original plan was to unveil the statue at Trump’s inauguration. Stockton talked about it looming over the National Mall. Cottrill, who said he agreed to do it for $300,000, had to work fast. “No one in the country could have sculpted it and cast it in bronze, 15ft scale, and did a wonderful job by everyone’s estimation in just a few months,” Cottrill said this week. “That usually commands a premium instead of a reduction.”
Cottrill and a few members of his team arrived in DC to stand the statue on a 6,000-pound concrete base they had made. The plan at this point was to install it inside the Capital One Arena at 1am on the morning of the January 19, before a rally Trump would hold on the eve of his inauguration.
“At 9pm [the night before] I get a call from the crypto guys,” Cottrill said. “They said the Secret Service just called.”
The temperature had plummeted; the Inauguration Day parade was to be held in the arena and the Secret Service were concerned at the prospect of an 18ft sculpture, weighing many thousands of pounds, looming over all those people, Cottrill said.
So the statue stayed in a warehouse outside DC and was then moved to another in Pittsburgh. Every payment he received arrived weeks late, Cottrill said. “They were supposed to have paid up last spring.” Then they asked to make payments in instalments. But “the biggest problem I had is the copyright infringement”, he said. He understood that the plan was for a statue that would tour the country, appearing at rallies and events.
“What I came to find out was they had launched a token, a meme coin,” he said. “That was their play all along.”
The website for the coin, the Patriot Token, bears a picture of Cottrill’s bronze. “I didn’t know they were going to do that. I said: ‘That’s copyright infringement,’” said Cottrill. “And they said: ‘Oh no, we bought the statue.’ I said: ‘Yes but you didn’t buy the rights to reproduce it for monetary gain.’”
Cottrill believes he is now owed for installation and for storing a lorry trailer at his premises, for which he has been charging them $300 a month — but the bulk of the outstanding balance is for the image rights, he said.
In November he approached his patrons with a suggestion. The enormous bronze was already burnished to look gold, but what if they coated it in gold leaf? The proposal was like a glass of water “to a person dying of thirst”, he said. “Immediately everybody jumped on board.”
Cottrill called up Sepp Leaf Products in New York, a leading supplier of gold leaf. They “did all the gold leaf for the White House”, said Cottrill.
Lauren Sepp, 45, said: “We have sold gold to clients who have gilded in the White House,” but she added that they had not done the gilding itself. She said they supplied 23.75-carat gold leaf for Cottrill’s Trump sculpture.
Gold leaf for the Trump colossus
ALAN COTTRILL
Cottrill called a gilder who had recently finished work on a prominent sculpture in Manhattan, but the man proved “real reluctant” to work on a giant Trump. “He said: ‘I just can’t do it because of the subject matter.’ I said: ‘Well, you may have a number of other people in your team. He said: ‘Alan, none of them would do it.’”
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Cottrill turned to an Ohio sculptor named Brenda Councill who had gilded the inside of several domes. The colossus was returned to Cottrill’s foundry in Zanesville, Ohio; its surface was prepped and then layers of delicate gold leaf, thinner than a butterfly’s wing, were applied to the giant Trump.
“It took us all of December,” said Cottrill.
For a while he had understood that the statue would be erected at Trump’s presidential library but last month he was informed that it would stand at the Trump Doral against a half-circle of three palms, overlooking the tenth hole.
“I went with my foundry manager to Doral three weeks ago to install the 6,000-pound base ahead of time,” he said. He brought a 12in version of the statue to get an idea of how it might stand. “It was the only thing I could get in my hand luggage,” he said. He positioned the pint-sized Trump on the pedestal. “The landscape architect didn’t like the look of the positioning of the three palms behind the base so they dug them up and repositioned them.”
Patriot Token then announced that “the team at Trump Doral will be busy cladding the pedestal, installing a ton of up/down lighting and landscaping” and promised that what the president “has in store for the $PATRIOT community and his inner circle for this unveiling will surely be spectacular!”
Trump’s son Eric responded with a post on X, thanking them for their “support and enthusiasm” but adding: “We want to be crystal clear — we are not involved in this coin.”
Cottrill said Pastor Mark Burns, an evangelical preacher sometimes referred to as the president’s spiritual adviser, had been involved in conversations about the statue and where it would go but Trump himself had not been involved in the project.
Everything is now ready. Stockton, one of Cottrill’s patrons, insisted that the artist would be paid as agreed. “We sent him a bunch of money recently,” he added.
Cottrill said that “the crypto bros want a date for Trump to unveil it and that’s why they have been holding off payments to me for the intellectual-property [IP] rights”, he said. “They have been infringing on my copyright for almost a year and a half now.”
He is still owed $91,200, Cottrill said. And the giant Trump is staying with him until he gets it. He added: “I can’t trust them to pay me otherwise.”
In a statement, the crypto entrepreneurs said that “the statue was paid in full a year ago and we recently paid in full to have the statue finished in 24-carat-gold leaf. The project also paid for 50 per cent of the IP rights around 6 months ago”.
They had paid the artist recently for the new gold finish and “we are confused as to why he accepted a similar amount of money for the gold application when he could have just asked us to pay for the balance of the IP if that was of concern to him”, they said. “Under any business agreement there’s always some funds withheld until the finished product is complete. Alan provided the group finished photos on Thursday January 29.”
They added: “He’s an amazing artist and despite his comments we greatly appreciate the work he completed on this historic statue.”