Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a gold-coated statue of a fully naked Donald Trump is now on display inside the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, courtesy of Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt.
The piece, titled “The Orange Plague,” stands 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) tall and is coated in 23-karat gold. It shows Trump seated on the shoulders of a smaller man, a golf club in hand. According to ThePrint, it sits at an intersection connecting two of the Parliament’s buildings, and Newsweek reports that it will remain on view through Thursday.
A card beneath it carries a short poem signed “The King of Injustice.” “I am sitting on the back of a man. He is sinking under my burden,” it reads. “I will do anything to help him. Except stepping down from his back.”
A gold statue of President Donald Trump fully naked can now be seen in the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, France.
“The sculpture is a satirical out-cry against Trump and the U.S. assault on the green transition and the rule-based world order,” said Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt.
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Galschiøt explained the Andersen reference on his website. “Like Andersen’s emperor, he believes the gold makes him great. It merely makes his nakedness shine brighter,” he wrote. According to ThePrint, the gold represents wealth, privilege and power “reserved for himself and his inner circle.”
The political target is spelled out just as clearly. “The sculpture is a satirical out-cry against Trump and the U.S. assault on the green transition and the rule-based world order,” Galschiøt said. He added that “This sculpture has been made to address ‘the elephant in the room.'”
Strasbourg is only the latest stop for the statue, which has been traveling for nearly a year. Galschiøt first brought it to the Global Climate March in Belém, Brazil, on November 15, 2025, during the COP30 summit. “We have a sculpture of Donald Trump next to us, on top of a poor man,” he said there, according to a translation of O Liberal’s report. He added that “we have to be together against Trump to make a better world.”
Newsweek reports that the sculpture later appeared at the Munich Security Conference in February, Denmark’s Rebild Festival marking the 250th anniversary of the United States, and Copenhagen’s “Hands off Greenland” demonstrations. Its next scheduled stop is the COP31 U.N. climate conference in Turkey in November.
Born in 1954 in Frederikssund, Denmark, Galschiøt has spent decades using public sculpture to make political statements. His best-known work, Pillar of Shame, was first erected in Hong Kong in 1997 to protest China’s crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Later versions appeared in Mexico, Brazil and Prague. In 2002, he created Survival of the Fattest, another provocative work built around a giant female figure sitting on the back of a man.
Featured image via X screengrab
