Trump Is the Best POTUS Ever, When You’re a Fake Christian Grifter

There must be something truly, deliciously freeing in being able to entirely surrender oneself to the life of a unabashed charlatan. Most people, flawed though we all must certainly be, could never genuinely bring themselves to live the life of an inveterate, shameless grifter. We’d be too embarrassed by the grubby business it entailed; our facades would crack under not just the pressure of being confronted by angry naysayers but by the sheer misanthropy of relying on everyone around us to be the dumbest marks imaginable, every single day. It takes an iron constitution to maintain the sort of hypocrisy this life requires. You commit to being a scumbag, as a way of life. Without doing that, how else does a Christian “pastor” end up standing in front of a giant, 22-foot tall golden statue of Donald Trump at the entrance of a Florida golf course, blithely praising the guy who Tucker Carlson says might be the Antichrist, and manage to ignore the outrageous sacrilege of it all? My guy, it’s the first commandment. It’s pretty hard to miss! Even non-Christians have heard this stuff!

And yet, there he stood: Pastor Mark Burns, a personal friend of Trump’s, a “spiritual advisor” to the POTUS and his administration since the very beginning of his first campaign for President in 2016, reveling in the glory of a huge, golden, Trump-shaped calf this week during the unveiling of the statue dubbed Don Colossus, outside the President’s own Trump National Doral Miami golf course. The President, originally rumored to be in attendance for the unveiling, instead chose to merely call in to salute everybody engaged in blasphemy on the sunny afternoon, perhaps displaying a longer term memory than he’s typically capable of in recalling that people were pretty pissed off when he recently posted an image of himself as Jesus.

My “this is not a golden calf” shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

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— Miranda Yaver (@mirandayaver.bsky.social) May 9, 2026 at 6:00 PM

Because this is a story revolving around Trump and grifters, the wise among us have probably already assumed that crypto-bros were involved in some way, and those suspicions would be well founded. The Don Colossus statue was commissioned by investors in a memecoin called $PATRIOT, seemingly intended originally as a publicity stunt to pump up their crypto investments through an unveiling during Trump’s second inauguration, when the statue was initially completed. But as so often seems to become a problem with this class of folks, the people who commissioned the $300,000 sculpture from artist Alan Cottrill suddenly became a lot less enthusiastic about paying the bill when the time came to do exactly that–inspired, perhaps, by Trump’s own example of famously refusing to pay anyone he hires to work for him. The statue thus sat in stasis until “an anonymous donor stepped in any paid the artist the remainder of what he said he was owed.” Hmmmm.

That cleared the way for the good Pastor Mark Burns to torch any pretext toward Christianity by presiding over the dedication of Don Colossus this week, which he enthusiastically posted to his own YouTube account afterward. Those who have followed the greater Trump menagerie of flunkies may remember Burns from Trump’s first campaign for President back in 2016, when he spoke at the RNC and became one of the campaign’s favorite voices, both for his volume and intensity, and no doubt for the fact that he was one of the few Black Christian figures willing to hitch his star to Trump’s wagon. He was later shown to be a well-documented liar, particularly in an absolutely humiliating CNN interview in which he was called out on scads of lies, from falsely claiming to be in the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, to a false claim he had served in the Army rather than the National Guard, to the bio on his website claiming he’d earned a degree from North Greenville University when the college in question said he attended it for only a single semester. But as we all know, none of that matters in the current political climate in which we reside: Scandal that would have ended someone’s career at a time when reputation actually mattered can now simply be discarded by those who know they can still profit off rubes by fully embracing cynical hypocrisy and culture war theatrics.

Still, Pastor Mark is at least tangentially aware enough of the basics of biblical sacrilege to know that the optics of standing next to a huge golden statue of your earthly benefactor is generally not the best look for a Christian leader, so he very amusingly went out of his way to explain to the Christians in the house that they should not worry: This is not a false idol/golden calf scenario. As he said in both his speech, and the eventual Instagram post dedicated to the opening:

Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone. This statue is a celebration of life. It is a symbol of resilience, freedom, patriotism, strength, and the will power to keep fighting for the future of America. It also stands as a reminder of the hand of God and His protection over President Trump’s life. Time and time again, when his life was threatened, God’s mercy prevailed.

It doesn’t really feel like I should have to point it out, but it really should be very easy to get through life as a pastor without having to say things like “Let me be clear: This is not a golden calf.” I mean really, all you have to do to avoid ever having to say those words would be … not standing next to a huge, golden monument to narcissism, as you describe that person as holy and anointed by the Almighty. Case in point: In my nearly 40 years on Earth, I’ve never once had to carefully explain to a crowd that I was not currently engaged in blasphemy or idolatry. Maybe I’m just gifted, I dunno.

Members of the Trump Organization/Trump family/Trump crime syndicate have already thought to insist that Trump’s own family/businesses have nothing to do with this particular $PATRIOT memecoin, if only because they don’t want their audience to get confused and purchase the wrong shitcoin, rather than the President’s own … which is down 82% in the last year, by the way. See Eric Trump below, saying that they have “no association of any kind” with the people who dropped a giant golden statue on his father’s golf course. Ah yes, that must be why Trump himself was posting all about it. I too frequently find myself posting about the people erecting statues in my honor to explain that I have no association with them.

Sculptures bearing Trump’s likeness, but less of his favor, have been making the rounds in Washington D.C. recently as well, courtesy of the protest group Secret Handshake. One, titled “Best Friends Forever,” depicted Trump alongside dearly departed lifetime friend and noted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and appeared mysteriously overnight near the Capitol. Another statue, dubbed “King of the World,” makes an ever-so-timely comparison of the same two figures to Jack and Rose from Titanic. For whatever reason, Pastor Mark Burns was not on hand to provide a benediction for these particular artistic achievements.

Still, I suppose it could be worse. For instance, the pastor in question could be another one of the President’s former spiritual advisors, pastor Robert Morris, who was recently freed from prison after serving only six months for child sexual abuse, with a 10-year suspended sentence. Truly, with so many great Christian leaders surrounding Trump, it’s safe to say that the morality of his administration was secured long ago.