President Donald Trump appeared to be the centerpiece of a major festival in Spain, but not in the way he might have hoped.
The 79-year-old president’s image was the focus of several caricatured effigies, or ninots, at this year’s Fallas festival in Valencia, Spain.
The traditional festival celebrates the city’s patron saint, Saint Joseph, with a five-day ceremony from March 15 to March 19, during which revelers create towering cardboard-and-papier-mâché monuments filled with fireworks called fallas.
Individual ninots are combined to create the massive fallas, which are paraded through neighborhoods until La Cremà, or the Burning, around midnight on March 19, when the fallas are burnt as giant bonfires.
Oftentimes, global political figures and events are satirized in creative ways at the festival, and Trump was a muse for many at this year’s event.
Some fallas depicted Trump standing on or carrying bombs or missiles, no doubt in reference to the president’s surprise war on Iran launched just over two weeks ago.
Others depict the leader of the free world cozied up to other world leaders, especially Russian President Vladimir Putin.
One example shows a massive, naked Trump sitting on a “fancy chair,” as he said during a Monday press briefing, while a smaller, shirtless Putin sits on Trump’s shoulder and plants a crown on his head.
A missile with the words “Sigo siendo el rey,” or “I’m still the king,” protrudes from the Trump effigy’s crotch.
Another falla features a Trump effigy carrying a baby bottle and a baby-sized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s wielding a rifle, close to his chest.
Earlier this month, Trump blasted Spain, a longtime ally, for initially refusing to let the U.S. use its military bases to launch strikes against Iran.
“Now, Spain actually said that we can’t use their bases, and that’s alright, we don’t,” Trump said during an Oval Office meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on March 3. “We could use their base. If we want, we could just fly in and use it.”
“Nobody’s going to tell us not to use it, but we don’t have to,” he added. “But they were unfriendly.”
The president then threatened to cut off all trade with Spain, and did so again on Wednesday, but no official embargo has been imposed.
The president has desperately pleaded for assistance from allies abroad to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but many—including Spain—have been hesitant to heed the call.
“Spain will never accept any stopgap measures,” regarding the Strait of Hormuz reopening, Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles said, according to NBC News, “because the objective must be for the war to end, and for it to end now.”
Other major allies, including the United Kingdom and Australia, have outright refused to send warships to the Middle East to aid the U.S. as Trump requested.
The Daily Beast reached out to the White House for comment.
