Sculptor Behind Gold-Leafed Trump Statue: ‘This Was Chaos’

A towering, gold-leaf statue of President Donald Trump was unveiled with great fanfare on Wednesday at Trump National Doral golf course, in a dedication ceremony that included a prayer from a MAGA-aligned pastor who put the president on speakerphone. But the artist behind it had choice words when asked about the two-year creation process.

“This was a clusterfuck,” Ohio-based sculptor Alan Cottrill tells New Times.

From his foundry in Zanesville (about an hour east of Columbus), Cottrill has worked on hundreds of commissioned statues now standing across the country, including multiple at the Ohio State University. But never has a commission been as chaotic as the crypto bro-funded, gold-leafed, looksmaxxed Trump unveiled this week at Trump’s golf club, he says.

“I usually deal with people that have everything organized. From the start, this was chaos,” Cottrill says. “I have 400 life-size or larger statues around the country. The patron sets a date when they want it installed, and I have it installed on that date. And almost never, anytime whatsoever, does anyone miss a payment, because I always do what I say I’ll do, and the patron always does what they say they’re going to.”

That wasn’t the case with the 15-foot (22 feet when you include the platform) Trump statue. Demands to nix the turkey neck and make the model skinnier, missed payments, and calls to install the statue last-minute — no Cottrill commission has been as complicated as the statue dubbed “Don Colossus.”

Tech bros Ashley Sansalone (a cryptocurrency developer based in Canada) and Dustin Stockton (a Republican strategist) teamed up with a group of other crypto bros to pay Cottrill $500,000 for the creation of a Trump statue based on the fist pump he gave after the July 2024 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. If Stockon’s name sounds familiar, it’s because authorities raided his property in connection with allegations that he was involved in defrauding donors of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s effort to crowdfund the southern border wall in Trump’s first term.

Sansalone and Stockton didn’t respond to New Times‘ requests for comment. But Stockton told the U.K paper The Times that the group did not agree with the sculptor’s description of what happened.

From Clay Clump to 15-Foot Trump

Cottrill, an Army veteran and founder of an international pizza chain, was in his late 30s when he touched clay for the first time and declared, “This is the mistress I’ve traveled the world in search of,” as he puts it in his website bio.

“Well, I tell people it’s kinda like the first time I kissed a girl. The minute I did that, man, that’s all I wanted to do,” Cottrill tells New Times.

From there, Cottrill built a business that’s attracted more than 500 commissions, with most standing in public places throughout the nation. In 2024, he got the call about making a giant Trump statue. The group of cryptocurrency acolytes, Stockton told The Times, was to highlight “one of the most iconic moments and to show our appreciation of his embrace of crypto.”

He said the group was in agreement: “If we are going to do this, we had to make it Trumpian.” Also, it had to look like gold.

When asked by New Times about his political leanings and whether he was excited by the commission request, Cottrill says, “No comment.”

The process of molding skinny Trump began with a life-sized clay model that wasn’t quite to the liking of Cottrill’s patrons, he said.

“I had him even skinnier than he is, a little bit. I knew they’d want that,” Cottrill said about the first model. “They said, ‘Oh, he’s too big.’ I’m close enough to his age, and I got some turkey neck going on, and I knew what that was. That’s what happens when you’re almost 80.” 

Cottrill says it actually only took him four-and-a-half months to make the 50 pieces he’d put together to make the giant Trump. It took another year and a half, however, for the installation at Trump National Doral to happen because it took weeks for Sansalone and Stockton to make their final $90,000 payment.

The tech bros in 2024 paid an initial $300,000 for the initial statue, then paid another $60,000 a year later for the gold-leaf plating, and another $150,000 to use imagery of the statue to promote a crypto token, Cottrill said. But getting the payment was easier said than done.

“‘You were supposed to make these payments nearly a year ago. I can’t trust you to do that,'” Cottrill recalls telling his patrons. “So I held the statue. I put it in an undisclosed location and said it won’t be delivered until the final payments have been made.

“Like I told the crypto guys from the beginning, I said, ‘Hey, I don’t fuck around, so you don’t fuck around with me.’ And, like my daughter said, ‘They fucked around and found out.'” 

After months of holding the statue hostage, the final payment finally came on April 22 with a phone call saying Cottrill had to have the statue installed the next day, ahead of the 2026 Cadillac Championship that ran April 30 to May 3.

“So I got in a truck with my foundry manager and we drove straight down and when we got to dropoff, we were told that we need this installed and all the gold leaf touched up by dawn tomorrow,” Cottrill said. “We usually would take three days to do all that, so we worked through the night till 4 a.m., and we finally finished. Then we slept two or three hours, got in the truck, and drove 18 hours straight back to Zanesville.”

Cottrill high-tailed it out of South Florida because he wasn’t actually invited to the unveiling and dedication ceremony that followed (another first for the sculptor).

When asked if Cottrill would ever work with the crypto bros or Trump’s team again, specifically for the upcoming Trump Presidential Tower in Miami, which, according to renderings, will include a large, gold-leaf Trump statue, he didn’t need to hear the full question before responding, “Fuck no.”

“Once somebody has shown that they can’t be trusted to do what they say,” he adds, “you don’t work with them anymore.”

Trump himself appeared to be pleased, writing on his platform Truth Social, “The Real Deal – GOLD – At Doral in Miami. Put there by great American Patriots!!! President DJT” However, the sculptor tells New Times, “don’t forget it’s just a normal bronze statue with a coating of gold leaf over the entire thing.”

A lot of gold leaf: “There were over 3000 3in.² leaves of 23.75 carat gold attached to the surface to cover the entire 15 foot statue,” he adds.