Donald Trump is not king of America
Earlier today, the President of the United States made a phone call from inside the White House to one of his most devout followers, evangelical pastor Mark Burns, who was in Florida at Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago. The call was quickly answered and broadcast over a speaker so the small group of Trump’s faithful gathered there could hear the president’s remarks during the ceremony they had come to witness: the dedication and blessing of a large gold statue of Donald Trump, fist raised in the air. A recreation of the moment he survived the attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania.
This was actually the second ceremony held in just two days for gold statues of Trump. The first took place Wednesday at Trump National Doral in Miami, where a separate 22-foot gold-leafed colossus depicting Trump with his fist raised was unveiled in a clearing of palm trees, draped in white and blue fabric like a Roman toga. And at this ceremony too, Burns lifted his cellphone toward the microphone so the Trump super fans could hear the President’s voice, helping to bless his own monument.
That is two gold statues, both blessed by a pastor who has publicly called Trump divinely chosen. Both featuring the same pose: fist in the air, the Butler moment, the near-martyrdom now cast permanently in gold and installed on the grounds of his private properties like shrines.
Burns stood before the Doral statue on Wednesday and told the crowd it was “not a golden calf.” He said it was “a powerful symbol of resilience, freedom, patriotism, courage, and the will to keep fighting for America.” He called it “a visible sign of a movement.” And then he assured everyone that “we worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone.”
But here’s what is most troubling. A pastor was standing in front of a 22-foot gold idol of a living president, leading a prayer of dedication, while crypto investors who funded the statue as a marketing vehicle for their memecoin watched from the crowd. The sculptor, Alan Cottrill, told the Daily Beast that when he pitched the idea of coating the statue in gold leaf, Trump’s team loved it immediately. “It’s like pitching ice water to a man dying of thirst,” he said. “It was not a hard sell.” The statue cost $450,000. The crypto coin it was built to promote, $PATRIOT, had already cratered, losing nearly all its value. But the statue went up anyway. Because the statue was never really about the coin. It was about the image.
And if it were just the statues, we could maybe look away. Call it strange or excessive, the behavior of a man with a famously bottomless need for admiration. But it’s not just the statues.
Yesterday, the President of the United States drove his motorcade through the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Not past it or around it. But on it. The pool had been drained for a renovation project that Trump personally ordered, and he rode across the bottom of it in an SUV, flanked by Secret Service vehicles, before stepping out and standing in the empty basin surrounded by Cabinet secretaries. He announced that he had personally selected the new color for the pool’s surface. He called it “American Flag Blue.” There is no official color by that name. He invented it, and then he stood between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, and he told the press, “Our country is about beauty, cleanliness, safety, great people. Not a filthy capital.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, standing beside him in the empty pool, said, “We’ve never had a president who has cared more, invested more, or put more time and attention into everything about the Mall.”
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The place where Marian Anderson sang in 1939 after being barred from Constitution Hall because she was Black. The place where Martin Luther King Jr. stood and told the world he had a dream. The place where Americans have gathered to mourn, to march, to demand that this country live up to its own promises. And Donald Trump completely disrespected it by driving through it like it was his driveway.
And it’s not just how he treats important monuments or what he says. It’s also his image. There will now be limited-edition passports issued as part of the 250th anniversary celebration of the Declaration of Independence, available only at the Washington Passport Agency. They will feature a portrait of President Donald Trump and include his signature in gold.
And then there is his face on the 2026 America the Beautiful pass for national parks, replacing the image of Glacier National Park. When people started covering his face with stickers, the National Park Service updated its policy to say that altering the pass could make it invalid. His signature is being placed on circulating U.S. paper currency for the first time in American history. The Treasury announced it in March. A commemorative coin is in production with his profile on one side and the Butler fist-pump on the other, with the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” stamped across the back. Federal law and long-standing U.S. tradition have generally restricted living people from appearing on currency, and the proposed coin immediately raised legal and historical objections. Treasury’s workaround appears to rely on the special 2026 commemorative coin authority, but the symbolism is still unmistakable. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco has stated plainly that the restriction on living faces exists “to avoid the appearance of a monarchy.”
Three-story banners of his face hang from the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. His face looks down on Pennsylvania Avenue from the same building that houses the prosecutors who once investigated him. The Kennedy Center has been renamed on the building to read the “Trump-Kennedy Center.” The road from West Palm Beach Airport to Mar-a-Lago has been renamed President Donald J. Trump Boulevard. A 250-foot triumphal arch, taller than the Lincoln Memorial, is planned for the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery.
And we can’t forget the airport. Just days ago, the Palm Beach County Commission voted 4-3 to approve a licensing agreement to rename Palm Beach International Airport the “President Donald J. Trump International Airport.” But this wasn’t just a naming honor. Before the Florida Legislature even finished passing the bill, the Trump Organization had already filed trademarks for the airport’s new name and its new code, DJT. The agreement gives the Trump family control over all biographical material presented at the airport and approval rights over branded merchandise. When they renamed an airport after Reagan, there was no trademark deal with the Reagan family. When they named one after JFK, there was no licensing agreement with the Kennedys. And based on what I can find, Trump is the first and only president to trademark his own airport name so his family can profit from it. It wasn’t enough to have his name on the building. He wanted to make money from the rebrand, too.
This is not vanity. This is a playbook being executed. This is the systematic installation of one man’s image over every symbol, institution, and monument that used to belong to all of us.
And none of this is new. In Pyongyang, two enormous bronze statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il stand at the Mansudae Grand Monument. Citizens are required to bow. Tourists are required to bow. The leader’s face appears on every piece of currency, in every classroom, in every home. Buildings are renamed for the leader. Public works are personally inspected by the leader, with state media documenting his every decree about design and color and layout. They call it “on-the-spot guidance.” The leader’s survival is framed as divine protection. His spiritual advisers declare him chosen by God. His image replaces the identity of the nation itself until there is no difference between the country and the man.
That is what is being built here, in a very literal sense. In bronze and gold leaf and banners and coins and passports and renamed buildings and a reflecting pool painted whatever color he tells them to paint it.
And the founders saw this coming. They saw it because they had just fought a war to escape it. George Washington, who led the revolution, who actually could have been a king and was offered something close to it, refused to put his face on the first American coins. He insisted that placing a living leader’s image on the currency was what monarchies did. The first U.S. coins, by his explicit direction, depicted Liberty, not a ruler. The Constitution forbids titles of nobility. The entire architecture of this republic was built on a single foundational principle: no man is king. No man’s face replaces the nation’s. No man’s name goes above the country’s. That was the whole point.
That was 1776, and here we are, 250 years later, and Donald Trump is doing the one thing the founders most explicitly and deliberately forbade. He is replacing the country with himself. He is putting his face where America’s used to be.
And while Trump is rewriting what America looks like, Republicans are rewriting how Americans vote. Today, the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the redistricting referendum that voters approved just weeks ago, on April 21. Virginians went to the polls in a special election and voted, by a 52 to 48 margin, to approve a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the legislature to redraw the state’s congressional map. The new map would have given Democrats up to four additional House seats heading into the midterms. And today, in a 4-3 ruling, the court threw those votes out. Declared them “null and void.” Not because there was fraud, or because there was a counting error. But because, in the court’s opinion, Democratic lawmakers made a procedural error in how they placed the amendment on the ballot, voting on it one day too late during a special session while early voting was already underway.
And here’s what’s infuriating. Virginia House Speaker Don Scott, the Democrat who led the redistricting effort, responded by saying, “We respect the decision of the Supreme Court of Virginia.”
We just watched a court tell millions of Virginia voters that their votes don’t count. That the people spoke, and the court said it doesn’t matter. That a procedural technicality carries more weight than the democratic will of an entire state. And the response from Democratic leadership was to respect the decision. This is not a moment for respect. This is a moment for outrage.
And as disappointing as this is, it doesn’t mean we will be unable to take back the House or the Senate. The current Virginia map still gives Democrats six of the state’s eleven congressional seats. The midterms are still winnable. People across this country are still furious about what this administration has done to their lives, their grocery bills, their health care, their kids’ futures. That energy hasn’t gone anywhere. But what this ruling does is make the fight harder. It means we lost four potential pickup opportunities in one state in one day. And it happened because Republicans went to the state Supreme Court to override the will of the voters, and they won.
This is what we’re up against. And it’s going to keep happening. Republicans have been redistricting aggressively across the country at Trump’s urging. Florida. Tennessee. North Carolina. Ohio. Missouri. And now, after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted racial gerrymandering protections in the Voting Rights Act just last week, Alabama and Louisiana are already moving to redraw their maps, too. Republicans could gain as many as 14 seats from redrawn maps across multiple states. They are not playing by the old rules. They are using every tool, court, and procedural lever they can find to lock in power before the voters have a chance to take it back.
And we have to stop pretending that the old way of doing things is going to work against this. This is not normal politics. The days of issuing polite statements and trusting the process are over. The process is being used against us. We need to demand that our representatives fight with everything they have. More legal challenges. Using every procedural tool they can find. Take every single available path. Not because we abandon principle, but because principle without action is surrender. And we cannot afford to surrender right now.
This is going to be the fight of our lifetime. If we want to make sure our children and grandchildren actually have a country worth living in, we have to take back Congress in November. There is no other path. Because look at what they’ve already done with the power they have. They have exploited it at every turn. Power and keeping it is all that matters to them. And they are willing to override the will of the voters to do it.
Today was a tough one. I’ve been carrying this all day. Not without hope, and not in a dramatic way, but with the weight of knowing that what happened in Virginia today was a reminder of just how much is at stake and how hard they are willing to fight to keep control. And on days like today, when the good news is hard to come by, I go back to the moments in our history when past generations felt the same waves of dread. There were days during the civil rights movement when it looked like nothing would ever change. When the courts ruled against justice. When the laws protected the powerful. And when the people who were doing the right thing were beaten, jailed, and worse. And they didn’t give up. They held their ground. They bled for it. They lost people they loved. And they changed this country forever. Not because the system handed it to them, but because they refused to stop pushing.
That’s what a real patriot looks like. That’s what the real America has always been. Not gold statues and banners and a man’s face on the money. But people who fight for each other, even when the odds are against them, especially when the odds are against them. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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Picture of the day: Saw this beauty on a walk.
Sources:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/gold-trump-statue-doral-false-idol.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-golden-statue-honored-in-bizarre-dedication/
https://apnews.com/article/214814ea23ae9412093167e49bbc20e8
https://apnews.com/article/passport-trump-us-250th-birthday-df2f0f96e4fbcee89ae904a65af398f0
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0425
https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/oct/07/trump-coin-mint-commemorative-dollar-legal/
https://apnews.com/article/12a31037f3c9a94d3cb9fbcaaf84d94f
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/05/08/virginia-court-invalidates-redistricting-measure/
The good news is that statues can be pushed down (Iraq) and currency can be refused to be used. Trump is very sick but more worryingly the sycophants around him are busy polishing his shoes because the amount of money sloshing around makes them feel strong and in charge. Please rise up and fight.
Today in a pretty hopeless voting day we have lots to think about in UK but we also celebrated the 100th birthday of a truly wonderful man David Attenborough who all his life has protected and talked about protecting the environment and animals that live in it. He is the sort of hero we should admire, not an out and out criminal busy annihilating a wonderful country with is greed and rotten behaviour.
I am in Rome on a family trip. Yesterday we visited the Colosseum and Roman Forum and listened to stories about emperors and kings and how they built monuments to themselves and I kept thinking about Trump. He is following the same playbook