Trump Derangement Reaches Titanic Levels

Don't worry, it's federally permitted.

If there’s anything Donald Trump dislikes more than Rosie O’Donnell, warm Diet Coke, and a broken CAPS LOCK key combined, it’s an unflattering effigy of himself. And his critics know it.

The natural result of this is that his haters spend their days dreaming up new, ridiculous, larger-than-life ways to enrage him by making him look awful. And while POTUS has yet to personally respond to the 12-foot statue of him and Jeffrey Epstein that was casually dropped on the National Mall this week, I’m going to bet it has his BP spiking like an Olympic volleyball hitter.

The installation was created by an anonymous group of artists calling themselves “The Secret Handshake” (which can we all agree sounds less like a political art collective and more like the name of a middle-school improv troupe?) and depicts a corpulent, nearly unrecognizable Trump standing behind Epstein, arms extended in what is clearly meant to be a reenactment of the Rose-and-Jack “King of the World” Titanic scene.

While it’s meant to be provocative, it’s actually a perfect metaphor for the social-media wing of the Democratic Party: loud, ugly, and completely untethered from reality.

The Epstein rendering bears only a passing resemblance to the convicted pedophile and instead is a gilded ringer of what you’d get if Gavin Newsom and the Joker had a grown-up baby. And the Trump figure looks less like the man currently in command of the nuclear codes and more like Fred Flintstone dressed up as the dad from The Wonder Years—or possibly the dad from The Wonder Years dressed up as Fred Flintstone.

You see it, right?

Accuracy, clearly, was not the primary artistic goal. And don’t even get me started on the side profile.

Satire has always had a place in politics. Protest art is practically a constitutional obligation. But where were the massive monuments featuring Bill Clinton reenacting the Oval Office scene with Monica Lewinsky, or Barack Obama fist-bumping a pallet of cash bound for Iran, or Joe Biden riding a bicycle into a sandbag? Maybe conservatives just aren’t that petty. Or maybe we’re too busy having actual jobs.

This particular installation also raises a question that feels increasingly unavoidable the longer you stare at it: How many meetings did this take?

Because this wasn’t a cardboard sign or a late-night graffiti job. This was a twelve-foot sculpture, which means at some point—likely multiple points—a group of adults had to sit down and strategically plan it. They had to bat around ideas, land on the Titanic reenactment, sketch out the statue, secure funding for materials, sculpt the figures, build a mold, fabricate the structure, arrange the casting, rent or borrow a crane and a truck, coordinate the transportation of a two-story statue through Washington, D.C., physically install it on the National Mall, draft and mount the plaque explaining the joke, design and hang the accompanying banners, and tip off journalists so the whole thing would reliably explode across social media by lunchtime.

And although the press likes to hype up the “anonymous artist” angle, the statue didn’t mysteriously appear in the middle of the night. It involved paperwork, a permit, and likely a polite conversation with a National Park Service official who had to approve the exact spot where several thousand pounds of bronze would be placed. In other words, someone at a federal desk processed a form that essentially said, “Description of display: twelve-foot sculpture of the sitting President of the United States embracing a deceased convicted sex offender from behind.”

This wasn’t a prank. It was an MBA group project with a forklift.

So yes, this pride of patriotic citizens took a break from posting crying selfies on TikTok to brainstorm ways they could support and uplift our great nation. “You know what this country really needs right now?” they asked themselves and each other. “No, not cheaper groceries. Not housing people can actually afford. Not a plan for the national debt, the border, the fentanyl crisis, or the fallout of the deadly Covid vaccine rollout. What we really need is another Trump/Epstein statue!”

They probably thought they’d never be able to top this work from last September.

Imagine explaining this historic moment to your ancestors.

TITANIC STATUE COMMITTEE CHAIR: “Your great-grandpa stormed the beaches at Normandy.”

GRANDKID: “No way! What about grandpa?”

TITANIC STATUE COMMITTEE CHAIR: “Your grandfather flew medevac helicopters in Vietnam.”

GRANDKID: “And what did you do?”

TITANIC STATUE COMMITTEE CHAIR: “I spent six months working on a giant statue of a guy I hated so people could take selfies with it.”

In an age where people insist the country is on the brink of complete collapse, a surprising number of Americans still have time to build oak-tree-size Titanic memes.

And that highlights the greatest irony of all: the anti-Trump movement could never exist without Trump himself. Years after he first broke their brains, entire groups of adults are still plotting revenge like a middle-school sleepover committee building the world’s biggest voodoo doll. Their political identity isn’t so much about what they believe as it is about who they despise. (I mean, Hillary Clinton makes my blood boil and my skin crawl all at the same time, but I’d no sooner build a statue of her—even a super-extra-unflattering one—than open a Bluesky account.)

For many, hating Trump is a full-time job.

And the thing is, they hate Trump more than they hate Epstein. Think about that. Jeffrey Epstein ran one of the most grotesque criminal enterprises in modern American history. He was investigated for years, charged, convicted, and jailed. His operation has brought down kings, world leaders, billionaires, and some of the most powerful men on the planet. It exposed unimaginable elite rot that stretches from Hollywood to Wall Street to Kensington Palace.

Yet through all of that, the guy didn’t get a single towering tribute of his own on the National Mall. Apparently the moral urgency required to move thousands of pounds of bronze across the capital only kicks in when the statue doubles as a Trump dig.

Go figure.

In related news, Jeffrey Epstein’s accountant just became the fifth witness to testify before the House Oversight Committee that Donald Trump had nothing to do with any of Epstein’s shady shenanigans. Unfortunately, that detail doesn’t cast nearly as well in bronze.

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