While President Donald Trump prioritizes adding his signature yellow-gold touch to historic fixtures within the Capitol, the European Parliament has satirized his self-monumentalizing proclivities by installing a gilded statue on its premises. The Strasbourg building is temporarily displaying Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt’s “The Orange Plague” (2025), which depicts a naked Trump sitting on the shoulders of a scrawny man straining under his weight.
Composed of copper and coated in 23-karat gold leaf, Trump’s slumping figure presses his abdomen into the back of his carrier’s head as he holds a small scale of justice in one hand and a scepteresque golf club with the other. The golf ball appears as a small globe, representing Trump’s worldwide grip and his disregard for the planet’s health.
In a project description, Galschiøt said that the sculpture references Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes (1837), adding that Trump “believes the gold makes him great.”
“This sculpture has been made to address ‘the elephant in the room’ and start a necessary debate of how the United States is destroying the world’s only chance to counter the climate catastrophe,” Galschiøt wrote.
He debuted the sculpture in Belém, Brazil, at the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) last November, and it has since traveled between Denmark and Germany.
“Nations as well as NGOs are afraid to openly raise the subject on how to deal with Trump and his policies, fearing tariffs, fund cuts, deportations, or the like,” Galschiøt explained in his statement, referencing what transpired during COP30 when various countries endorsed, and quickly reneged on, a pollution reduction agreement after the Trump administration threatened retribution.
This is not the first time the president has been stripped down to incite conversation. In 2024, an enormous, nude effigy of Trump was suspended on the outskirts of Las Vegas, and in 2016, several life-size sculptures of Trump were installed across the US, including in Union Square.
Galschiøt creates provocative sculptural and performance interventions addressing global issues of religious conflict, authoritarianism, racial intolerance, human rights violations, refugee crises, climate injustice, and world hunger. Among his best-known works is “Pillar of Shame” (1997), a sculpture commemorating those who were killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Danish politician and European Parliament member Per Clausen sponsored the temporary exhibition of “The Orange Plague,” which will only be in Strasbourg until Thursday, October 8, before it heads to Anatolia, Turkey, for COP31 next month.
