The sculptor behind a 15-foot statue of Donald Trump said it was incredibly easy to sell the president’s goons a shiny gold $60,000 add-on.
Ohio-based artist Alan Cottrill said it was his idea to give the bronze statue a gold-leaf finish, telling the Daily Beast that when he suggested it to Trump’s team, “They loved the idea, of course. It’s like pitching ice water to a man dying of thirst. It was not a hard sell.”
It was just one of the ways Cottrill managed to up the total price of his creation from $300,000 to $450,000, after also making an extra $90,000 when developers for $Patriot, the crypto token it is linked to, used images of it for marketing purposes before the sale was finalized.
“The crypto boys used the image of my statue to launch their token, and that’s a copyright infringement,” Cottrill told the Beast.
The artist says a conflict with the company began when $Patriot halted their payments for the project.
“And then we worked out a payment for the copyright infringement, and then they didn’t pay for it. They made a couple of payments and stopped, so I refused to release the statue until full payment was made. So I put it at an undisclosed location.”
An initial version of the statue, nicknamed ‘Don Colossus,’ was ready to go when Trump was inaugurated in January last year, but it has only now been erected, more than a year later, at the Trump National Doral golf course.
Cottrill, 73, said when he pitched his golden $60,000 idea, there were “two White House representatives on the call, two Patriot people on the call, Trump’s spiritual adviser, and two representatives from Doral Golf Club.”
In February, the New York Times reported that Pastor Mark Burns, often regarded as Trump’s informal spiritual adviser, had been a key player in getting the statue erected and in changing it from bronze to gold.
The Times said he’d told the coin’s developers in November, “The president just asked me for pictures of his statue in gold leaf.”
When Cottrill sent an image of it, Burns said, “Wow… sending to the president.”
The newspaper added that it had seen a text message from December in which Trump replied to a message from Burns, saying, “It LOOKS FANTASTIC.”
It comes despite Trump’s son, Eric, distancing the family from the project in February.
“We appreciate the support and enthusiasm,” he said, “but we want to be crystal clear—we are not involved in this coin.”
The Daily Beast has contacted $Patriot and the White House for comment.
