From afar, even from nearby, the site on the left bank of the Sava River is unremarkable: two small hunks of bronze atop a severed linden tree. It is only accessible via a rough white road that departs unannounced from route 679, a rural highway connecting the somnolent Slovenian towns of Sevnica and Krško. A few hundred metres beyond a narrow railway underpass marred by Putinist graffiti, the stump sits on the edge of a cornfield.
Until recently, the trunk had been a plinth. Two bronze feet are all that remain of a semi-abstract sculpture of Sevnica’s most famous daughter, Melania Trump (née Knavs), unveiled here in September 2020. The uninitiated would have struggled to recognize the stylized statue as the First Lady of the United States, though its raised left palm – evoking a presidential wave – was a clue, as was its vacant stare. This life-sized Melania, the work of American conceptual artist Brad Downey, was ambiguous – neither celebration nor obvious satire – perhaps provocatively so. It was kidnapped earlier this year by anonymous vandals who sawed the statue off at the ankles.
The bronze statue was itself a replacement; violence had been visited on its predecessor too. In 2019, Downey had made a wooden effigy of Melania, in collaboration with a local craftsman, Ales ‘Maxi’ Zupevc, who carved the figure into the linden tree using a chainsaw. The nine-feet-high sculpture, painted powder-blue, succumbed to an apparent arson attack on 4 July 2020. The bilingual plaque installed beneath the bronze replacement, since also vanished, explained: ‘This statue is dedicated to the eternal memory of a monument of Melania which stood in this location from 2019-2020. This bronze monument is an exact replica of the original artwork.’
First wooden, then bronze, now an eerie absence. Fittingly, Melania herself is no stranger to chameleonic transformations. Fashion is her politics. During the first Trump administration, she drew controversy by donning a Zara anorak emblazoned with the words ‘I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?’ during a visit to a detention centre for migrant children in a Texan border town. During Trump’s second inauguration, social media buzzed with speculation about the severe navy-and-white boater hat shading Melania’s unsmiling visage throughout the ceremony. These aesthetic provocations both called for and defied interpretation. What could Melania possibly mean?
There are no hints in her blockbuster memoir, published a month before the 2024 election. Critics scoured the ghostwritten book for insights yet came away empty handed (‘one of the flattest, most abstract, and least revealing accounts of a life that I’ve probably ever read,’ the New Yorker concluded). Her performed indifference to the enigma she presents is her defining feature as a public persona. Spectacle, for Melania Trump, is a dish best served cold.
The contrast with her husband is stark, and perhaps strategic. However erratic his conduct, Trump’s is not an aesthetics of ambiguity, as his own fixation with monumentality testifies. On 3 July 2020 – the day before the first of Downey’s statues of Melania was reduced to a charred remnant – Trump received a gift equal to his outsized ambitions. During a presidential visit to Mount Rushmore, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem presented him with a four-foot replica of the granite monument to Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln. A miniature with a twist: to the right of Lincoln’s recessed profile, Trump’s likeness peers forward beneath beetling brow. Such an addition to the real monument remains geologically impossible; a recent survey of the bluff in the Black Hills concluded that the granite cannot support another giant bust.
As TJ Clark argued after the 2025 inauguration, Trump is ‘a creature of the society of the spectacle’, but the spectacle today lacks Olympian majesty; it is pocket-sized, the product of algorithms: ‘Trump has annihilated the idea of charisma. The new leader is not above us. He’s on the screen in our hands. We manufacture him: our fingers are just his size.’ Today’s authoritarians are nostalgic for the monumental dispensation of the nineteenth century, which hinged on ‘the demand that the great be eternal’, in Nietzsche’s scathing assessment. They are dissatisfied with our diminished era, in which greatness has been reduced to the evanescent banality of digital ubiquity. Trump, El-Sisi, Erdoğan, Modi: each of them revel in megaprojects which function more as bloated expressions of state power than as real infrastructural futures. Simultaneously, longstanding monuments that once luxuriated in the ‘invisibility’ of collective indifference described by Robert Musil have become flashpoints in the politics of the present – from Sevnica to Cape Town, Charlottesville and Bristol. And the spectacle of overturning monuments is equally inseparable from its instantaneous mediation, its Instagram iterability.
In the context of this fraught renewal of interest in monuments – whether nostalgic or denunciatory – Downey’s Melanias and their peculiar fate acquire an unlikely resonance. The char of the first Melania persists as an exhibition piece, touring with other items from Downey’s oeuvre. The second is still missing. Perhaps her kidnappers have plans for her. Yet the empty pedestal above the Sava is a rare site where solitary contemplation of the absurdities of the spectacular politics of our post-monumental age is possible. A third Melania may yet appear, but for now, her ersatz absence resounds in ways that her ersatz presence did not.
Read on: Dylan Riley, ‘What Is Trump?’, NLR 114.