The Orange Plague: When Satire Becomes Spectacle

Six weeks without a post. Illness and family troubles have kept me occupied with the inconvenient business of being a human being.

I had hoped to spend my time arguing about the state of the world, rather than being reminded of my own small place in it. Unfortunately, Providence has a habit of interrupting one's plans without first consulting one's editorial calendar.

But I am back, and have an article to prove it. I trust the world has managed to muddle along without my assistance, though I cannot guarantee that it has improved in my absence.

Normal service, such as it is, resumes below. 

Apologies to the Cressie and Lain for the images. One fears you may both be overcome by an attack of the vapours!

Introduction

'One doesn’t expect to find a statue of a naked, golden Donald Trump inside the European Parliament. Yet, for three days earlier this month, there he sat in all his glory in Strasbourg. A gilded figure more than two and a half metres tall, covered in 23-carat gold leaf, perched on the shoulders of a smaller, frail man stooping beneath his weight. In one hand, the great man holds the scales of justice; in the other, a golf club. A globe lies at their feet.

The work, The Orange Plague, or The King of Injustice, by Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt, was placed in the building at the invitation of a Danish MEP, Per Clausen.

The statue has been noticed, as its maker presumably intended. What interests me is what it achieves, and what its presence in a parliamentary building says about the institution.

I am no admirer of Donald Trump. His policies and conduct raise serious criticism. But I neither applaud this sculpture nor want it banned. The artist has every right to make it. He has the right to offend, and people have the right to find it offensive.

My question is about good judgement, and about what ridicule achieves. The right to make a fool of a ruler is one thing. Whether one has made a fool of oneself in the process is another.

The artist’s case

Galschiøt says the sculpture criticises Trump’s record on climate and foreign policy, and the burden American power places on people. The inscription has Trump, the rider, declare that he will do anything to help the man beneath him except step down from his back. The gold suggests vanity and wealth; the scales, a ruler who values authority over justice; and the nakedness, borrowed from Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor, his haughtiness. The stooping figure shows the cost of power. The argument is presented visually: the magnificent man depends on the people who carry him.

Whether it persuades depends on whether you already accept the artist’s political judgement. The sculpture does not demonstrate that judgement. It gives it a memorable shape.

An old weapon, and who holds it

Ridiculing rulers is an old habit in popular politics. For much of history, it has been a weapon for people without power. In ancient Rome, anonymous notes were pinned to a battered statue called Pasquino, mocking popes, cardinals, and aristocrats. 

In Georgian London, James Gillray showed Pitt and Napoleon carving up the globe like a plum pudding, turning a tangle of geopolitical ambitions into an image any tavern crowd could understand and enjoy.

Trump has been here before. In August 2016, an anarchist collective called INDECLINE placed naked statues of him in public spaces across five American cities under the title The Emperor Has No Balls, invoking the same Andersen tale. They did it without permission. New York’s parks department removed its statue the same day, and San Francisco’s came down at night. 

That is the distinction worth noticing. The nakedness motif is old, and so is the mockery. What is new in Strasbourg is the invitation. Pasquino spoke though nobody licensed him, and the authorities treated INDECLINE’s statues as protests from outsiders.

Ridicule has never been inherently democratic or liberating. Its meaning depends on who uses it, against whom, and from where. Hosted inside an official institution, the same work changes character. A parliament is a proper home for dissent, and housing a work does not make it the institution’s own voice. It does, however, lend it credibility and makes the institution answerable for how its premises host it.

The anger that wants a person lowered

Anyone who has worked with people in trouble learns to recognise two impulses in anger. One wants a wrong put right. The other wants a person lowered. The first can often be reasoned with, because beneath it lies a grievance that may be understood and addressed. The second tends to stop listening altogether, because it seeks revenge and a victim.

The two are rarely found apart. A man can have a genuine grievance and still take pleasure in another’s pain and humiliation. Most of us have experienced both. To which do we grant the upper hand?

Galschiøt has said that he normally attacks systems, but here he intended to attack Trump personally. That candour is useful. Personal satire is not inherently illegitimate. Sometimes one individual embodies the issue being criticised, and mocking him can illuminate it. The test is whether the personal attack highlights the political question or merely supplies an object of contempt. The sculpture used nakedness to expose the emperor’s pretensions. Yet it is also, unavoidably, the humiliation of a physical body. When INDECLINE’s statues appeared in 2016, one Guardian critic called them ageist and body-shaming, finding them wanting as both art and satire. 

Satire can be contemptuous yet true. It can also be courteous. Therefore, humiliation alone proves nothing for or against a work. My concern is one of proportion. When humiliation becomes the loudest element in the image, it risks drowning out the argument it was meant to carry.

Contempt is a posture toward a person, not an argument about his conduct or policies. Christians have long insisted on the distinction between the deed and the doer. One need not share the creed to see the wisdom in that. A person can be wrong, even dangerously wrong, and remain someone to be answered rather than disposed of. Once contempt becomes the standard register of public life, opponents begin to seem unworthy of a hearing at all. A politics of people who dismiss one another rather than hear one another is impoverished.

Does ridicule work?

Satirists tend to assume it does. Their critics suspect it does more harm than good. Research on satirical news offers a useful check on both assumptions. A 2022 meta-analysis by Christian Burgers and Britta Brugman brought together 70 studies involving nearly 23,000 participants. 

Satirical news made audiences feel more positive and helped them learn when the alternative was receiving no information at all. But it did not improve factual learning more than ordinary news, and the evidence that it persuaded people was limited. It also increased what researchers call “message discounting”: audiences were more likely to take the message less seriously, or dismiss it as a joke.

A 2024 study, based on six experiments involving more than 3,000 participants, found that humour could make audiences more likely to agree with a message, while also making them more likely to dismiss it as a joke. These effects pulled in opposite directions. 

These studies examine satirical news, not sculpture. They cannot tell us exactly what The Orange Plague will achieve. But they suggest that three questions need to be kept separate. Does the work make people notice an issue? Does it help them recognise and understand a contradiction? Does it persuade anyone to reconsider a judgement? An arresting image may succeed at the first and do little towards the third.

Attention comes easily. A sculpture criticising American foreign policy might earn a paragraph in a newspaper. A giant, golden, naked Trump earns headlines around the world, with the outrage adding to the publicity. Here lies an irony. If the artist objects to political leaders being swallowed by spectacle, wealth and the cult of personality, then creating a spectacle designed to provoke an equally theatrical reaction risks reproducing the very culture he condemns.

The provocation becomes the story, and the argument disappears behind it.

In Andersen’s tale, the child does not expose the emperor with an ingenious or gratuitous insult. He simply says what is true. The story’s real subject is the court, which has grown too fearful to say what everyone can see. The emperor’s nakedness matters because it exposes a collective dishonesty. Good satire can do something similar: it makes a truth harder to ignore. Weaker satire merely makes the ruler smaller. Yesterday’s object of reverence becomes today’s object of contempt, and the audience enjoys its turn at the top.

Galschiøt’s statue invites us to see a contradiction between the ruler’s self-image and the burden he imposes on others. But it leaves little room to discover that contradiction for ourselves. We are given the verdict before we have considered the case.

Sometimes a blunt, even savage image is necessary. Politeness can become a way of avoiding public wrongdoing rather than confronting it. But satire has its own temptation: the pleasure of knowing that we are not among the fools. Once an audience starts congratulating itself on seeing through the deception, the work may stop challenging anyone. It becomes a badge of belonging, worn by those who believe they already know the truth. There is a certain comfort in having it confirmed that the people we despise are as ridiculous as we suspected.

The room it stood in

Had the statue stood in a gallery, a public square, or outside a political rally, I would have seen an artist using his freedom in a noisy public argument. Inside the European Parliament, it takes on a different significance. A parliamentary building is not simply another venue. It is home to an institution meant to sustain democratic debate among people from countries with different histories, convictions, and political traditions. Its own rules for exhibitions on its premises forbid anything that undermines its dignity or is offensive, inflammatory, or contrary to the Union’s founding values.

Did this work cross that line?

It would be wrong to say the Parliament as a whole endorsed the sculpture. An elected representative chose to bring it in, but such exhibitions require authorisation, and this one was approved.

 The public criticism so far has been limited. Alice Weidel, co-leader of Alternative for Germany, condemned the display on 7 October as an inappropriate mockery of the US president and a diplomatic blunder. Hers is the only condemnation I have found reported. At the time of writing, Trump had not responded.

Diplomatic propriety deserves consideration, given that the United States is an important partner no matter what one thinks of its president. Powerful leaders can tolerate mockery, and the artist was not conducting diplomacy. The deeper objection does not depend on whether any diplomatic damage follows. It depends on what a parliament lends its authority to.

Institutions express their character through what they are willing to accommodate, even when those things do not speak for them officially.

The test of consistency

Would those celebrating the sculpture be quite as enthusiastic if it depicted a politician they admired? Would they call it a valuable contribution to public debate, or see it as a mere act of spite?

It is easy to defend standards when they constrain our opponents. Their true worth becomes clear when they restrain our own side. European politicians rightly defend democratic institutions and the dignity of public office when these are threatened elsewhere. But they weaken that defence if they drop it whenever the person ridiculed belongs to the opposing camp.

The problem is not that Trump has been offended. Presidents survive mockery, and so they should. The problem is that an institution devoted to democratic politics has confused the freedom to make a spectacle with the wisdom to do so. In Andersen’s tale, the remedy for the court’s pretence was a child’s unguarded, honest sentence. He says what the adults are unwilling to acknowledge. A parliament, of all places, should know the value of a true thing said plainly, in public, by someone who must answer for it. Satire may help that process along, but it cannot do the work in its place.