At this point, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame has been defaced, pissed on, and obliterated with a pickax—twice, leaving local lawmakers calling for the thing to be removed for good. Now, seeing as the president and his star don’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon, someone took it upon themselves to lock him up.
According to the Huffington Post, Los Angeles-based artist Plastic Jesus pulled the stunt Wednesday morning, plastering black wooden bars over the star with a little bit of industrial grade double-sided tape—a relatively docile prank, compared to the criminal charges Austin Clay faced for smashing the thing in July. The anonymous artist is the same guy who built a tiny border wall around the star back in 2016, and put that gold statue of Harvey Weinstein on a casting couch outside the venue for the Oscars earlier this year.
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“There have been calls to jail Trump since the day he was elected,” Plastic Jesus told HuffPo, potentially referencing the sexual misconduct allegations against him, or the Mueller probe. “And today he was certainly put behind bars.”
Trump supporters rallied behind the star after July’s pickax demolition, fighting back by covering the Walk of Fame in fake, peel-off Trump stars. This time around, Plastic Jesus said a few people broke some of the bars by trying to yank them off the ground, but that for most of Wednesday, the little prison stayed relatively intact. It’s long gone by now, though someone already went ahead and vandalized it again:
All the attacks on Trump’s star have sparked a legitimate political fight over getting rid of the thing for good, after the West Hollywood City Council unanimously passed a resolution in August asking the entities in charge of the Walk of Fame to have it permanently removed. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which runs the landmark alongside the City of LA, has always refused to remove stars as a policy, and hasn’t budged on Trump’s. But with accused abusers like Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey, and Brett Ratner still honored alongside Trump on the Walk, WeHo’s City Council is hoping the Chamber will change its mind.
“What [these stars] are communicating to people is that we are going to uphold these people as our heroes, no matter what we find out about them,” WeHo city councilor Lindsey Horvath told VICE in August. “That their level of fame, or the amount of money they made (or that the studios made) is more important than whether they abused people, than whether they harassed people, than whether they disrespected people in order to get to that top star. I just don’t think that’s who we want to be as a community.”
It may be a coincidence, but Plastic Jesus’s latest prank came just days before 24-year-old Clay, who admitted to smashing the star in July, was scheduled back in court Friday for sentencing. He pled not guilty back in August, but could face up to three years behind bars.
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