Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame has been vandalized, again, this time by an artist who put prison bars over the monument.
As Huffington Post reports, a British-born street artist using the name “Plastic Jesus” is the latest person to put their own touch on the much-maligned marker. In a series of Instagram posts, Plastic Jesus says that he put prison bars over the star as a metaphor for what he believes is Trump’s impending incarceration.
“Today I put @realDonaldTrump behind bars.”
In an email to the Post , he explains why he did it.
“There have been calls to jail Trump since the day he was elected, and today he was certainly put behind bars.”
And, he notes, he didn’t just lay the bars on the ground in such a way that they could easily be moved by anyone with a mind to do so — as an apparent Trump supporter later found out.
“Although it was very quickly damaged by a Trump supporter trying to remove it the bars did appear to be stuck fast and were there several hours later ? to the amusement of thousands of passing tourists,”
He says that he affixed the bars to the ground using an industrial-strength, double-sided adhesive. This serves two purposes, he says: it keeps them snug to the ground, but their removal won’t damage the marker once they’re removed. Jesus says he didn’t want a bill for thousands of dollars in repair costs once the bars are removed.
Jesus’ act of vandalism is the latest in an ongoing series of acts of defacement against the few square feet of sidewalk.
Awarded in 2007 at the height of popularity of The Apprentice , Trump’s star went largely ignored except by the odd fan who stopped for photos. But ever since he announced his candidacy for president in 2016, the star has been attracting a great deal of attention.
At least twice it has been hammered to pieces by a man wielding a pickaxe, once by elevator-company heir James Otis, and later by another man — whose bail and legal fees Otis promised to pay. Countless other incidents have seen the star vandalized by anti-Trump stickers and graffiti.
It’s also been the scene of less-direct demonstrations, such as being metaphorically guarded by a Trump supporter — as well as being satirically “guarded” by men role-playing as Russian guards. And at least once, angry groups of Trump supporters and Trump opponents have gotten into a heated clash at the scene, eventually dispersing before the LAPD could arrive.
