Sculptor of Trump’s giant statue said pitching $60,000 gold add-ons to White House was like giving ‘water to a man dying of thirst’

The sculptor behind the 15-foot-tall, more than $400,000 statue of President Donald Trump, currently erected at his golf club in Miami, said selling the White House on an additional $60k for gold-leafing was no problem.

Ohio-based artist Alan Cottrill had been commissioned by the team behind the cryptocurrency $PATRIOT to create a colossal bronze statue of the president for roughly $300,000. But he later had the idea to make the statue in gold – a signature of the president, Cottrill told The Daily Beast

On a call with two White House representatives, two people from the $PATRIOT crypto team, Pastor Mark Burns, and two representatives from Trump National Doral Golf Club, Cottrill pitched the idea.

“They loved the idea, of course. It’s like pitching ice water to a man dying of thirst. It was not a hard sell,” Cottrill told the online news outlet.

The gold leafing would be an additional $60,000.

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The Independent has asked the White House for comment.

The president is well-known for his love of gold decor. Since returning to the White House, he has transformed the Oval Office with accents of gold – from furniture to lamps to wall decor to picture frames.

Along the West Wing colonnade, the president has installed a new “Presidential Walk of Fame” that features a portrait of each president in a gold frame.

The Trump administration has launched the Trump Gold Cards, an exclusive visa for wealthy individuals seeking to invest in the United States.

Naturally, a statue of Trump suits a golden sheen.

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Burns, who is sometimes referred to as the president’s informal spiritual adviser, is credited with helping bring the gold-leafing possible, according to the New York Times. He connected the president to the people behind the statue, nicknamed “Don Colossus.”

“IT LOOKS FANTASTIC,” Trump wrote to Burns in December after requesting a photo of the statue in gold leaf.

While members of the White House and the president himself were aware of the statue’s construction, the Trump Organization has taken no part in the creation of the memecoin associated with it.

The team behind $PATRIOT, a memecoin, had the idea for the gold statue after the president survived his first assassination attempt in 2024, according to reports. They were inspired by the fist-pumping image of the president emerging from a Secret Service huddle after a gunman managed to hit the president’s ear with a bullet, causing him to bleed.

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The statue was initially to be unveiled in conjunction with Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025. But a series of complications delayed it, including a dispute between Cottrill and the $PATRIOT team over using an image of the statue to launch the coin.

“The crypto boys used the image of my statue to launch their token, and that’s a copyright infringement,” Cottrill, 73, told The Daily Beast.

Eventually, Cottrill worked out a deal with the crypto team – they would pay an additional $90,000, bringing the total cost of the statue to $450,000, according to reports.

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