Gilt-y: golden Trump statue pops up at rightwing CPAC summit

Any doubts that Donald Trump still commands a near religious following will be dispelled by the appearance of a golden statue at a major conservative conference this week.

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A viral video from Bloomberg reporter William Turton shows two men in suits pushing the kitsch monument through the corridors of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, where admirers snap photos of it.

The statue is larger than life, with a golden head and Trump’s trademark suit jacket with white shirt and red tie. Bizarrely, the disgraced ex-commander-in-chief also appears to be sporting stars-and-stripes shorts.

The statue is fitting because of the golden thread that runs through Trump’s career. An intelligence dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer, contained the salacious – and still unproven – allegation that Trump watched sex workers perform “golden showers” by urinating on each other in a Russian hotel room in 2013.

In 2018, the Guggenheim Museum in New York reportedly turned down a White House request to borrow a painting by Vincent van Gogh and instead offered the administration an 18-carat gold toilet – an installation by artist Maurizio Cattelan.

Trump is due to give his first post-White House speech at CPAC on Sunday and there is plenty of other evidence that he remains hugely popular with this section of the Republican party.

Attendees can buy $2 bumper stickers that say “Trump is my president”, “Biden is not my president”, “Trump 2024” and a picture of the 45th president with the question “Miss me yet?”

One T-shirt has a picture of Trump with the slogan “Undefeated impeachment champ”; another shows Joe Biden with a Hitler-style moustache and the words “Not my dictator”.

Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, got the event under way on Friday by claiming that his state’s lack of coronavirus restrictions were a success story.

“We are in an oasis of freedom in a nation that’s suffering from the yoke of oppressive lockdowns,’’ he told attendees.

“We look around in other parts of our country, and in far too many places, we see schools closed, businesses shuttered and lives destroyed. And while so many governors over the last year kept locking people down, Florida lifted people up.”

More than 30,000 people in Florida have died from Covid-19.