Here's Why Anarchists Erected Naked Trump Statues

It was a sight to create sore eyes: Naked and extremely unflattering statues of a Donald Trump without testicles were erected simultaneously in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Seattle early Thursday. Anarchist collective INDECLINE was behind the project, and a spokesman tells the Washington Post that the "Emperor Has No Balls" project was designed to humiliate the candidate and was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale. "Trump is a larger-than-life figure in world culture at the moment" and the statues are also a reference to the tendency of authoritarian leaders to erect statues of themselves, the spokesman says.

The group tapped artist Joshua Monroe to design the statue because of his background in designing monsters for movies and haunted houses. He tells the Daily Beast that he "utterly detests" the Clintons and wouldn't hesitate to create a similar statue of Hillary Clinton. The statue in New York City's Union Square was quickly taken down, as was the one in Cleveland. "NYC Parks stands firmly against any unpermitted erection in city parks, no matter how small," a Parks Department spokesperson tells Gothamist. "People have asked if I was upset that the statues are being destroyed," Monroe tells the San Francisco Chronicle. "Not at all. I wouldn't mind taking a baseball bat to one." (More Donald Trump stories.)