In the pantheon of acts a person might do to prove to onlookers that they are evil, not just selfish or bad-mannered or misunderstood but evil, of the Old Testament variety, it feels like erecting a golden statue of oneself stands above all the others. It feels, to me at least, unique in that regard.
Don't get me wrong. There are a great many evil acts a person can do, if they have a mind to do it. You could blow up a school with all the children in it. You could rise to the top of government, then devote yourself to siphoning the nation's riches into your own pockets. Faced with multiple crises, you could brush them off, choosing instead to obsess over the construction of your own lavish Pleasure Dome for the purposes of entertaining yourself and your allies.
But those things all have caveats to them. You can work around them, at least a bit, and deny them, at least a bit. You can claim that leveling a school full of children was an accident. You can argue that the government has done some cruelty to you that now requires justified compensation. You can assert that you are not building your stately Pleasure Dome for yourself, but for the good of all; after you are done with it and have dissolved back into the dirt, the Pleasure Dome will still exist, and for decades or generations afterwards can host new pageants according to the whims of others.
A golden statue of yourself, though, has no plausible secondary purpose. It exists solely as a celebration of your own form. Monarchs and dictators throughout history have long justified the construction of grand palaces filled with art and luxuries and gold, as much gold as can be scavenged, as projects intended to show the majesty of the nation, past, present, and future; they are meant to invoke a sense of awe in the populace and in its enemies alike. A feeling over overwhelming permanence; a demonstration of luxury, and therefore of violent power, that no enemy of the state can hope to match. It may stand for a century; it may stand for a millennium. You may dissolve into history, but build a great monument and it will indeed outlast you. The name Louis or Ramesses will not go completely uninvoked; you have built your own stone footnote.
When you erect a golden statue of yourself? Then it becomes a different thing. It is an act of singular self-absorption. It is universally seen as symbol of despotism. It is the literary shorthand to show that a powerful figure is irredeemable, and it seems a universal shorthand for identifying a tyrant. A head of state who commissions a golden statue of themselves is a head of state destined for the gallows or worse. It is the marker of vanity gone so amok as to have detached from reason entirely. It is self-regard so encompassing that it has manifested itself into the physical world.
Put up a golden statue of yourself, and it is taken by all to be a challenge to the gods. Here I stand, your equal, it calls out. It is so ostentatiously wasteful, so pointedly useless, so un-inheritable and un-transferrable as to be an immediate burden to those around it.
Why is it so obvious, though? What is it about a golden statue of a living person that is so instantly recognizable as malicious, even in the first few seconds of seeing it? What have we lived through, as a species, that makes our nauseous reactions seem so very instinctual?
PatriotTakes 🇺🇸
Ah. Maybe it is because a golden statue is so obviously meant to be a target of worship. Our shared histories of equating great displays of wealth (or of pretended-at wealth) with power and therefore with the divine are so strong and span so many millennia that at this point the symbolism can't be discarded even if we want our brains to do it. "I have gold, therefore I am born of the divine" has been the relentless and explicit claim of rulers across cultures and continents. It remains true today. And it remains true even on (or especially on) our television sets, screens that show supposed religious prophets sitting amid gold leaf and insisting that you send them money so that they can buy more.
So we know that this is as soon as we see it. It's impossible not to. A 15-foot golden statue of Donald Trump on a 7-foot pedestal will gaze out over Trump's Doral golf course in Florida. Look upon my works, ye putters, and despair.
There are those who might insist that no matter what the collected literatures and histories of the world might suggest about similar golden statues, this is not meant to invoke religious fervor or borrowed divinity. But those that erected the statue on Trump's behalf, on Trump's property, were careful to inoculate themselves against any such defenses. The statue was dedicated not by statesmen (the United States has few at the moment) or by true Trump friends (he has none), but by an assembled collection of religious figures.
[O]n Wednesday, the statue was formally unveiled at a dedication ceremony presided over by Pastor Mark Burns, a friend of the president who helped organize the project.
At this point, you’re probably thinking, Uh, isn’t gathering to praise a giant golden statue textbook idolatry? I’m glad you (hypothetically) asked because this was actually one of the very first things Burns addressed in the captions to his Instagram posts on the event.
“Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone,” he wrote.
Then why was the statue's dedication handled by a scruffy collection of self-proclaimed religious leaders? Why did Burns call the dedication "not just a ribbon cutting," but "the public display of a powerful movement that has spread across America and the world"?
Never mind. There was no point in asking.
Now, there is one technicality that Trump can point to in insisting that it it was not him, precisely, that erected a golden monument to Donald Trump on Donald Trump's property for the purposes of praising and honoring Donald Trump. He did not spend any money on the project (though he likely is spending money to install it and will certainly pay for its upkeep.)
And this is true: The statue dedicated by the bizarre assemblage of crank religious figures was, in fact, the project of a cryptocurrency company trying to curry favor with Trump and his acolytes. The project nearly collapsed when the company began using images of the statue before they ponied up the full cash they owed to the sculptor for it.
The story of this Not A Golden Calf is Trumpian from start to finish, in fact. Of course Trump didn't pay for it himself. Of course it was intended as a publicity-seeking bribe meant to curry favor with the man. Of course the statue was in fact funded by an industry infamous as the money launderers of mobsters, drug kingpins, and other criminals. Yep. That is exactly how the backstory of a golden statue of Donald Trump would go; there wasn't a chance it'd be anything different.
That is how we got to the scene of American pastors and rabbis dedicating a literal golden idol with Trump's face on it. That is how we got to the part of the story in which the evil figure and his underlings perform an act so pompous and self-regarding that it is used as the shorthand whenever an author or historian wants to demonstrate the irredeemable nature of the villain. It comes not long after Trump posted an image of himself as Jesus, healing the sick with a golden light flowing from his palms.
At this point, this is beginning to feel like a put-on. The rise of Donald Trump, a buffoonish and plainly malevolent figure who has shown nothing but contempt for everything in the world but himself, has increasingly felt almost supernatural in its ridiculousness. Trump has rampaged through our world while being so obviously, transparently destructive that only the greatest idiots among idiots could possibly think he was anything but a grifting fraud, but the shoe never drops. Time and time again, the man sabotages the nation with such precision that it seems impossible to believe the sabotage was not his plan all along; time and time again, Americans both powerful and not glaze him as a near-divine figure for doing it.
It is enough to make a person paranoid. It's enough to make a person wonder if everything we are seeing is a barely disguised plot by a higher-dimensional being to see just how much bullshit our species can tolerate before getting wise to the joke.
Trump is, specifically, antichristian by any sense of the term. He leads a movement that is gleefully antichristian, one that not only does not object but clamors for more. Where America once tried to heal the sick, Trump and DOGE severed the help and waited for the deaths. Where America once tried to feed the hungry, the same crew blocked the effort and send word to let the food to rot in government warehouses. Children barely exist in Trump's mind other than as sex objects. He does not act unless it is for self-enrichment. He lives to tease and to smear. He rapes. He cheats. He steals. Quite literally, on each count.
And he has done so with American elites and an American rabble wrapped around his finger the whole time, even when it is so obviously destructive to the supplicants as to be nonsensical.
It feels like a test, perhaps? It feels like a grand conspiracy. We have multiple millennia of warnings to fall back on. Beware of false prophets. Beware of the great deceivers. And it was always imagined that the great deceivers in question would be wickedly brilliant minds, great saboteurs who could manipulate good people into supporting monstrous deeds through schemes of supernatural cleverness.
But this isn't that at all. This is an age in which evil all but proclaims itself to be evil, and still has the supposedly pious among us rushing past us full tilt to join its ranks. There is no subterfuge here. No master plan. No meaning behind the cruelties except to be cruel; no meaning to the pageantry except as pageant.
A man demolishes the East Wing to build a Pleasure Dome. A man ejects the Institute of Peace from its own property, then hangs his own name above the doors. A man bumblefucks his way into countless crises, and for it the preachers of a gospel of prosperity lay hands on him, and call him blessed by the divine, and erect a golden idol to celebrate his greatness.
This is all an elaborate put-on, right? We are living out a bet between God and the Devil: How malignant can a single figure be, if he wraps himself in the barest trappings of faith, before the would-be righteous realize they have been conned? Or perhaps there are aliens among us even now, and before revealing themselves they are first issuing a test to determine whether humanity counts as an intelligent species or merely a prolific one. If we prove ourselves to be at least as capable as the primates we evolved from, we will be granted access to the interstellar; if we prove to be nothing but dolts with a propensity for violence, a comet's orbit will be given the smallest of nudges so that it impacts this planet and extinguishes us before we can get up to any worse mischief.
Somewhere, Zaplor is idly watching a hologram depicting our current troubles. What would happen if I arranged for a literal golden idol to be dropped into this society of child-starvers, he asks. Every time I tweak events to favor this malevolent avatar, the species responds by increasing his power. If I include even the universal and interplanetary totem of avarice—what would happen then?
It would be nice to think so, anyway. We would all get a very good laugh of it, in the end, if it turned out that our long history of abiding even the most openly cruel was the result of otherworldly powers, rather than something baked into our genes since the time we were bony fish. If it turned out our brains were not as advanced as our brains have been telling us, and that most of us can be bent to antisocial viciousness simply by dangling something that glitters in front of us, now that would be unbearable.
No, it must be a test. This is all either a joke or a test or a trial; we will be back to normal once it passes. We are not so stupid as to see evil wrapped in gold and call it good. We are not so indifferent as to shrug our shoulders at concentration camps; we are not so gullible that a handful of men cannot bend us all to their will with only the barest of agitprop. This is only a fever, and it will break.
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