The Don Colossus and the Return of the Bronze Age

A toppled statue, a burning planet, and the price of mistaking spectacle for greatness

Good morning! Somewhere in Ohio, lying flat on its back like a fallen idol from a forgotten empire, is a 15-foot, gold-leaf statue of Donald Trump. Commissioned by crypto bros. Funded by a meme coin. Meant to immortalize Trump, fist raised, as a martyr of destiny. Instead, it’s unfinished, unpaid for, and stranded in a sculpture studio because the investors didn’t pay the artist, the coin collapsed by more than 95 percent, and the backers allegedly used images of the statue to hype their cryptocurrency without the artist’s permission.

The sculptor, sensibly, refuses to install it without getting paid and says the unauthorized promotional use of his work is an ongoing copyright violation. The statue, dubbed the “Don Colossus,” because irony is truly dead, now exists only as a legal dispute and a punchline.

If future historians need a cover image for the Trump era, they won’t have to look far. There it is: a gilded strongman monument funded by grift, abandoned mid-construction, lying on its back while everyone argues about who owes what. Welcome to the Bronze Age.

Like all Bronze Ages, ours is rich in spectacle, superstition, and regression. Take the Olympics, for example. While Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych honored fallen athletes by wearing a helmet bearing the faces of teammates killed by Russia, the International Olympic Committee swooped in to ban it as “political.” Grief, apparently, is too disruptive for the pageantry. The dead must be kept off-camera so the show can go on.

At the same time, Pope Leo, quietly, without tantrums or Truth Social posts, sent 80 generators and thousands of medical supplies into Ukraine so civilians can survive winter blackouts and relentless bombardment. Antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and even melatonin, because people living under missile attacks can’t sleep. It’s like watching a leadership exercise in contrasts.

Back home, Trump took time out from threatening Canada over a bridge to rage at an American Olympic skier who admitted that representing the U.S. right now brings “mixed emotions.” Freestyle skier Hunter Hess said he loves his country, but is troubled by what’s happening, ICE shootings, crackdowns, and the erosion of basic rights.

“Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.,” Hess said. “One of the many things that makes this country so amazing is that we have the right and the freedom to point that out.”

Trump’s response was to call him “a real loser” and complain that he was “very hard to root for.”

In the Bronze Age of Trump, moral reflection is disloyalty, grief is political, and silence is required.

In Minnesota and beyond, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has escalated into something darker than aggressive enforcement. Masked agents in unmarked vehicles are boxing in civilians. People are being arrested under a sweeping federal “obstruction” statute for doing things like following ICE vehicles at a distance. Names, photos, license plates, and “suspicious behavior” are being entered into internal databases.

Videos verified by Reuters show officers drawing guns on drivers, smashing windows, pepper-spraying passengers. One ICE officer reportedly followed a woman back to her home after running her plates, “to freak her out.” Another was caught on video telling a man, “You raise your voice, I erase your voice.”

The Don Colossus isn’t just a symbol of regression — it’s a reminder that bronze was never the strongest metal. It was the age of monuments, not resilience. And this regime is building statues while the future burns.

ICE Director Todd Lyons is set to testify before Congress this week, though even former officials admit his answers will likely be “pre-answered.” Titles don’t matter in this administration because responsibility flows nowhere. Meanwhile, ICE enjoys a $75 billion funding infusion, the largest in its history, and continues operating even as courts, journalists, and communities sound alarms.

Now Democrats, finally, are drawing a line. With U.S. citizens dead and public approval for ICE collapsing, senators who usually blink first are refusing to fund DHS without reforms. They want judicial warrants, identification, no secret police behavior. In other words: standards most police departments already follow. Republicans call these demands “nonstarters.” The hands they refuse to tie are the ones currently pointing guns at civilians.

All of this, as horrifying as it is, is merely the prelude. While the Don Colossus lies abandoned in Ohio and ICE prowls neighborhoods like an occupying force, the administration is preparing its most consequential act yet: the deliberate dismantling of the government’s ability to respond to climate collapse.

This week, the Trump administration is set to repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” the scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. That finding is the legal foundation for federal climate regulation. Pull it out, and the entire structure crumbles.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is openly bragging about what comes next, calling the repeal of the endangerment finding “the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.” This move would erase federal requirements to measure, report, and limit emissions from vehicles, with power plants and industrial sources likely next. It doesn’t just undo Biden-era policy, it handcuffs future administrations, even if voters demand action, by ripping out the legal foundation that treats greenhouse gases as a threat to public health. Worse than climate denial, this is sabotage.

At the exact moment climate impacts are accelerating, fires, floods, heat deaths, insurance collapse, the administration is choosing Bronze Age regression and ideology over science.

To mark the occasion, Trump will accept an “Undisputed Champion of Coal” award while announcing new coal plant deals. Charcoal once fueled the forges of the Bronze Age monuments, brittle weapons, and idols. Now Trump is reviving coal itself, as if dragging us not just politically but metallurgically backward, stoking the same fires while pretending it’s progress, fossil fuel cosplay, staged as destiny. Environmental groups warn that these regulations prevent hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year. Like the sculptor’s unpaid invoice, these costs are simply ignored.

Hovering above it all is Elon Musk, gazing skyward and tweeting about “self-growing cities on the Moon” and “off-site backups of humans.” If Earth is collapsing, his solution isn’t repair, it’s escape. A billionaire bunker fantasy with rockets.

The symmetry couldn’t be more perfect. Trump builds a gold statue funded by a meme coin. Musk pitches lunar lifeboats and images of bouncing toddlers for the wealthy. Both abandon the only civilization that actually exists.

I don’t say this lightly: the climate crisis is the existential threat. As deeply as I care about social and economic justice, I place climate justice at the very center of everything, because without a livable planet there is no justice left to fight for. No civil rights, no economic dignity, no future generations to inherit anything but smoke and floodwater. Climate justice means recognizing that the people least responsible are already suffering first, and that solving this requires fairness, solidarity, and systemic transformation. But we also cannot forget that physics does not negotiate. While billionaires like Elon Musk sell escapist fantasies about Moon cities and “backups of humanity,” because its “so cool,” the real work is here, now, on Earth. A rising stock price is not a survival strategy. Tech hype is not foresight. Civilization is not a meme coin or a Mars brochure. Saving this planet from short-term greed dressed up as innovation is not optional, it is the central moral obligation of our time.

The Don Colossus lies on its back in Ohio. The Moon city remains a fantasy. And here on Earth, the bill is coming due.

Future history books won’t argue about this era. They’ll just put the statue on the cover, the Don Colossus, unfinished and fallen, and note the moment when leaders chose spectacle, escape, and grift over the planet their grandchildren were supposed to inherit.