It appeared on Monday morning without warning or fanfare: an ironic monument to Donald Trump’s genitalia in a New York state park, topped with a tiny golden mushroom.
Less than 24 hours later, it was gone – removed by New York’s state park police, which now says it is “investigating” the incident.
The prank plinth was the latest in a series of mysterious public art installations that have suddenly popped up in Washington, DC, Portland, Oregon, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania over the past week, according to HuffPost.
Each one sarcastically “honored” a specific incident from Trump’s chequered history as a politician, including his infamous Access Hollywood comments and his equivocation about the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist rally.
This latest sculpture appeared in Donald J Trump State Park, on an area of land about forty miles north of Trump’s Manhattan headquarters that was donated to the state by the real estate tycoon in 2006, and which has recently faced many calls to rename it.
Entitled “The Very Large Donald J Trump Monument,” it paid homage to porn star Stormy Daniels’s description of the former president’s penis as “like a toadstool” and “like the mushroom character in Mario Kart”.
“As you can see this is a very large monument. Definitely the biggest,” said the plaque on the front of the distinctly phallic column.
“Despite this towering statue’s impressive heft, the President’s former mistress, Stormy Daniels, knowingly slandered the President as having a ‘smaller than average’ monument and claimed it is an ‘unusual’ monument similar to ‘a mushroom’…
“This towering monument stands in defiance of these false statements, so that we may all bear witness to the truth of this giant, very normal monument.”
A park police officer told reporters on Monday that the monument was being “disposed of”.
