Crypto investors' golden Trump statue 'Don Colossus' set for Florida debut

It’s known as “Don Colossus.” At 15 feet tall, the statue of US President Trump, mounted on its 7,000-pound pedestal, is about the height of a two-story building — a giant effigy cast in bronze and finished with a thick layer of gold leaf. 

For more than a year, the golden statue has been at the centre of one of the stranger moneymaking ventures of the Trump era. A group of cryptocurrency investors paid $300,000 to have a sculptor create it as a tribute to Trump, an outspoken crypto proponent.

Then they used it to promote a memecoin called $PATRIOT. 

 

Now, improbably, the project appears close to fruition. A pedestal made of concrete and stainless steel was installed last month on the grounds of Trump’s golf complex in Doral, Fla. Pastor Mark Burns, one of the organisers of the effort and a friend of Trump’s, told his collaborators that the president planned to attend the statue’s unveiling there, according to messages reviewed by The New York Times. 

“It LOOKS FANTASTIC,” Trump wrote to  Burns in December. 

The construction of a giant statue was an expensive way to gin up social media excitement. But it was a potentially profitable plan. The investors who financed the statue were given stashes of the coins, which can sometimes skyrocket in value, according to one of the project organisers. For months, the backers of “Don Colossus” posted work-in-progress images on X and forged alliances in the MAGA world, with the aim of securing a marketing coup — a spot for the statue on an official Trump property. 

The $PATRIOT coin went on sale in late 2024 and briefly surged, as Trump promised to turn the US into the “crypto capital of the planet.” At an event in Washington during inauguration weekend, the coin’s backers presented a bronze miniature of the statue to Steve Bannon, Trump’s former advisor, and mingled with other conservative influencers. 

 As the coin’s backers rushed to finish the statue and boost coin sales, they clashed with their Ohio-based sculptor, Alan Cottrill.

In text messages reviewed by The Times, Cottrill said he was owed $75,000 for the intellectual property rights to the statue. “You are using my copyrighted image in marketing your token!” he wrote to one of the coin’s backers last month. “Yes lol as we planned to from day 1,” replied Ashley Sansalone, a crypto developer who worked on $PATRIOT, as well as a separate coin called Elon GOAT.