What It's Like to Sculpt Trump's Naked Body Every Day for 5 Months

NEW YORK, NY — "We really thought to ourselves, 'If we pull this off, it's going to be epic,'" an anonymous spokesman for INDECLINE, the group behind the five naked Donald Trump statues that popped up in major cities across America on Thursday, told Patch.

Five months and $5,000 later, they pulled it off.

The guerrilla art and activist group glued five gruesomely unflattering statues of Trump to the ground in five different cities Thursday: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

The naked Trump in Manhattan's Union Square, revealed at around 10:30 a.m., attracted a crowd of hundreds. The statue was ripped from its plaque by city employees around 1:15 p.m. — but not before inspiring anti-Trump sentiment from the highest levels of city government, including Mayor Bill de Blasio's office and the city's Department of Parks and Recreation.

"NYC Parks stands firmly against any unpermitted erection in city parks, no matter how small," the department said in a statement issued late Thursday.

The statue weighed in at 50 lbs. of pure plastic, according to a spokesman for INDECLINE.

A rebar fish bone appendix was strung through both of its legs, then attached to the base to make it slightly more difficult to remove, the spokesman said. The rebar was meant to serve as a support system in the event that someone full-on tackled the statue, he said.

"These things were on a kamikaze mission, so the longer they can stay in place, the better," he said.

The glue used by INDECLINE on the statues' plaques was industrial strength and dried in minutes. The group wanted to make the unveiling as quick and seamless as possible, a spokesman said, and wanted the works of art to remain on display for as long as possible.

The five-month project was the longest in INDECLINE's 15-year history, the spokesman said.

The INDECLINE spokesman who spoke to Patch refused to give his name, saying only that he spoke for the group as a whole.

"We hope we could contribute to the thrust behind the hammer that's pushing the nail into his coffin right now," the spokesman said of Trump.

Cleveland-born artist Joshua Monroe, the 36-year-old sculptor behind the group's five naked Trump statues, has a background in haunted house design and was aiming to give Trump's naked form a gruesome touch, according to INDECLINE.

Gruesome, indeed: A close-up look at the statue reveals creepy blue varicose veins smattered down his drooping gut and thighs. And light your eyes upon the statue's frighteningly small private region too long, and its tangle of orange-yellow pubic hair — almost tubular in form — starts to look more like a pile of writhing earthworms.

Speaking by phone to Patch, the sculptor, who goes by the name "Ginger," said that throughout the five months it took him to build five naked Trumps, he went from backing the Republican nominee to instead planning to vote for Gary Johnson, the independent presidential candidate.

"When I first started this project, I informed INDECLINE I was strongly leaning towards voting for Trump," Monroe said. "This is really before he stuck his foot in his mouth and let people know what his true stance on things was."

What changed Monroe's mind was Trump's mockery in November 2015 of New York Times reporter Serge F. Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a condition that limits function in his joints.

"I have family with disabilities," Monroe said. "I cannot stomach that in a politician or a human being in general. For him to stand there as a grown man acting like that, it was appalling to me."

The sculpting process itself — which Monroe described as exhausting — may have also swayed the artist's vote.

"With that major amount of fatigue, I've developed a little bit of a resentment towards looking at that face every day," he said.

Since the sculptures' debut, Monroe said he's received several comments online from people accusing him of body-shaming Trump.

"Joke's on them," he said. "I'm a chubby guy. Why would the pot call the kettle black?"

Photos by Sarah Kaufman/Patch