A bronze statue of Melania Trump in her native Slovenia has gone missing.
Police have mounted a search for the metal likeness of the first lady, which had stood on a tree stump in a private field in her hometown of Sevnica. The statue was chopped off at the ankles.
“The theft was reported on 13 May and immediately police officers visited the crime scene and launched an investigation,” police spokesperson Alenka Drenik Rangus said on Thursday, The Guardian reported.
According to police and the statue’s creator, American conceptual artist Brad Downey, the life-size object was removed from its perch at the ankles.
Downey told AFP that he is “a bit sad that it’s gone,” adding, “My feeling is that it has something to do with the new election [of Donald Trump], but who knows, right?”
The statue had been erected in September 2020 to replace a wooden carving of Melania Trump that was set alight on July 4 of that year. The original, which depicted Trump in her Inauguration Day blue dress and heels, had stood for about a year.
Both the wooden and bronze items were a collaboration between Downey and local artist Aleš Župevc. For the former, Župevc took a chainsaw to a fallen linden tree, according to The Guardian.
Downey denied having anything to do with the 2020 fire.
“I neither set fire to the statue, nor did I commission anyone to do so,” he said.
The new structure, he told German magazine Monopol at the time, had to be “as solid as possible, out of a durable material which cannot be wantonly destroyed.”
It’s unclear if Trump herself had ever seen either statue in person. As for her husband, the answer is no. In all his travels since taking office in 2017, Donald never visited Slovenia, meaning he also never saw the 26-foot wooden statue there depicting him as a two-face.
“One is human and nice, the other is that of a vampire,” creator Tomaz Schlegl explained.
But that structure didn’t last, either. It, too, was torched.
