The Donald Trump statue at Trump National Doral (Image: Adam Schupak/Golfweek)
The PGA Tour has returned to Trump National Doral for the first time in a decade, and the course has welcomed it back with something that has stopped players, staff and caddies in their tracks.
A 15-foot gold statue of Donald Trump, installed just off the walkway between the first tee and driving range, depicts the president with his fist raised following the July 2024 assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, though not everybody on site seemed thrilled with its presence.
The statue, officially dubbed the “Don Colossus,” sits on a two-tiered concrete pedestal that brings the total height to 22 feet. The 3.1-ton bronze structure is covered in gold leaf, and the pedestal alone weighs 7,000 pounds. It comes as Trump awkwardly halted his state dinner speech to deliver a message to Rory McIlroy.
It was commissioned by $PATRIOT, a cryptocurrency group, and created by Zanesville, Ohio sculptor Alan Cottrill, though its journey to Doral was considerably more complicated than simply carving and installing a likeness of the president.
Cottrill had been paid $300,000 for the bronze work and another $60,000 for the gold leafing, but a dispute emerged after the crypto group used the artwork’s likeness to sell crypto tokens, which Cottrill alleged constituted copyright infringement.
He held the statue in an undisclosed location in Muskingum County, east of Columbus, and refused to release it until all parties reached an agreement. That resolution came last week.
Donald Trump’s statue is 15 feet tall (Image: Getty)
Cottrill wrapped the statue, strapped it to a flatbed trailer and drove it from Ohio to Miami himself, before installing it on the custom-designed pedestal overlooking the resort’s golf courses. “Now fully installed, the sculpture is prominently positioned overlooking the resort’s golf courses, where its gold-leaf surface interacts dynamically with the South Florida light,” Cottrill said in a press release.
On Tuesday, during pre-tournament festivities for the Cadillac Championship, the statue became the dominant conversation on the driving range. Players lined up to offer their reactions, most of them diplomatic.
Rickie Fowler, who lives nearby in Jupiter, managed two sentences. “It’s big and gold. About all I got. It’s his place — he can do whatever he wants.”
Maverick McNealy confirmed what everyone could see: “It’s very tall and very gold.” Tommy Fleetwood found humor in it. “If I have my own resort one day maybe I’ll put a big gold statue of me on it,” the Englishman said with a laugh. “We’ll see.”
Not everyone was inclined to engage. When a tournament photographer gathered a group of PGA Tour staff members and asked if they wanted a group photo beside the statue, he received a collective and immediate refusal. The photographer’s response was pointed. “Ok, I didn’t know you were all so woke,” he said.
The Cadillac Championship runs from April 30 to May 3 at the Blue Monster, which last hosted a PGA Tour event in 2016 before the relationship between Trump and the Tour fractured during his first presidency. The course has since hosted four LIV Golf events.
Whether Trump himself will appear at Doral this week remains unclear, but his presence on the property is already impossible to miss.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s golf hobby has come at a staggering cost to taxpayers.