The Golden Statue Problem (or: When Power Starts Casting Statues of Itself)

There’s a moment in every decaying empire when the leader stops asking to be admired and starts requiring it. That’s when the art gets bigger, the gold gets thicker, and dissent starts to smell like smoke.

According to reporting by Donald Trump-watchers who still have the stomach for it, we’ve entered that phase. Again. Louder this time.

As Peter Baker of The New York Times lays out, Trump’s lifelong obsession with branding—his name etched, stamped, bolted, and gilded onto anything that will hold still long enough—has metastasised into something stranger and darker in his second act. It’s no longer just hotels and towers. It’s culture, government, and history itself being pressed into service as a mirror.

This is the guy who put his name over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, because subtlety is for people who don’t confuse legacy with signage. His admirers are now erecting a 15-foot, gold-plated statue of him at his Miami golf course. They’re calling it Don Colossus, which sounds like something dreamed up in a writers’ room at Saturday Night Live, except nobody yells “cut,” and the cheques clear.

And it doesn’t stop at fandom. There’s talk—real talk—about naming battleships after him. About christening White House renovations with his own surname. One loyalist even floated the idea of renaming the moon, because when you run out of buildings and weapons platforms, celestial bodies are the next logical step.

Former aides, the ones who escaped with their consciences intact, are sounding alarms. They’re saying what this looks like from the inside: a presidency less about governing than about elevating a single man to permanent centre stage. Historians are saying the quiet part out loud, too—that omnipresence is power. If your face, your name, and your likeness are everywhere, resistance starts to feel futile.

Baker does what good historians do: he draws the uncomfortable comparisons. Joseph Stalin. Mao Zedong. Benito Mussolini. Men who didn’t wait for history to judge them—who carved their verdicts in stone while they were still breathing.

Trump doesn’t flinch from the analogy. At rallies, he calls himself “strong.” At the World Economic Forum in Davos, he leaned in harder, joking that sometimes you “need a dictator.” Jokes like that land differently when the joke-teller is surrounded by uniforms, money, and applause.

Defenders like to reach for George Washington as a precedent. After all, the capital bears his name. But even Washington waited. The monuments came later, after death had done what power could not—silenced the ego. There’s a difference between being honoured by posterity and grabbing the chisel yourself while the republic is still standing.

Which brings us to an older story. Older than America. Older than empires that thought they’d last forever.

King Nebuchadnezzar built a massive golden statue and commanded everyone to bow. Music played. Officials gathered. Compliance was mandatory. Non-compliance came with fire.

Most people bowed. A few didn’t.

Shadrach. Meshach. Abednego. No slogans. No counter-statues. Just refusal. They understood something tyrants never do: that worship extracted under threat is hollow, and that survival isn’t the same thing as obedience.

Nebuchadnezzar heated the furnace hotter. Power always does when challenged. And then—here’s the part dictators hate—the fire didn’t do what it was told. The men walked free. The spectacle backfired. The king blinked. (Daniel 3)

Every cult of personality believes it’s writing a new chapter. It never is. It’s just repainting the same old idol and hoping no one remembers how the story ends.

Gold statues crack. Names fade. Furnaces go cold.

What lasts are the people who decide not to bow—even when the music is loud, even when the crowd is large, even when the fire looks real enough to kill you.

That’s the part worth remembering.