"Great story. I especially enjoy the moving of the three palm trees."

Texted Meade after I sent him "'It’s not leaving until they pay me': sculptor holds Trump statue hostage/Alan Cottrill created an 18ft bronze capturing the moment the president survived an assassination attempt. He says his patrons aren’t paying up" (London Times).

There's a lot going on in this story, but keep reading, you'll get to the palm trees:

“What they owe me is $91,200,” [the sculptor Cottrill said].... “They know it’s not leaving until they pay me.” Dustin Stockton, 44, one of his patrons, declined to discuss the giant Trump statue with its new skin of gold, which the cryptocurrency entrepreneurs had hoped to keep under wraps until a suitable occasion was agreed for the president to unveil it himself....

But “the biggest problem I had is the copyright infringement”, [Cottrill] said. He understood that the plan was for a statue that would tour the country, appearing at rallies and events. “What I came to find out was they had launched a token, a meme coin,” he said. “That was their play all along.”

The website for the coin, the Patriot Token, bears a picture of Cottrill’s bronze. “I didn’t know they were going to do that. I said: ‘That’s copyright infringement,’” said Cottrill. “And they said: ‘Oh no, we bought the statue.’ I said: ‘Yes but you didn’t buy the rights to reproduce it for monetary gain.’”...

In November he approached his patrons with a suggestion. The enormous bronze was already burnished to look gold, but what if they coated it in gold leaf? The proposal was like a glass of water “to a person dying of thirst”, he said. “Immediately everybody jumped on board.”...

For a while he had understood that the statue would be erected at Trump’s presidential library but last month he was informed that it would stand at the Trump Doral against a half-circle of three palms, overlooking the tenth hole.

“I went with my foundry manager to Doral three weeks ago to install the 6,000-pound base ahead of time,” he said. He brought a 12in version of the statue to get an idea of how it might stand. “It was the only thing I could get in my hand luggage,” he said. He positioned the pint-sized Trump on the pedestal. 

“The landscape architect didn’t like the look of the positioning of the three palms behind the base so they dug them up and repositioned them.”

Patriot Token then announced that “the team at Trump Doral will be busy cladding the pedestal, installing a ton of up/down lighting and landscaping” and promised that what the president “has in store for the $PATRIOT community and his inner circle for this unveiling will surely be spectacular!”... 

Cottrill said that “the crypto bros want a date for Trump to unveil it and that’s why they have been holding off payments to me for the intellectual-property [IP] rights”, he said. “They have been infringing on my copyright for almost a year and a half now.”

He is still owed $91,200, Cottrill said. And the giant Trump is staying with him until he gets it. He added: “I can’t trust them to pay me otherwise.”

In a statement, the crypto entrepreneurs said that “the statue was paid in full a year ago and we recently paid in full to have the statue finished in 24-carat-gold leaf. The project also paid for 50 per cent of the IP rights around 6 months ago”....