‘The Boys’ Creator Reacts to Real Gold Trump Statue That Perfectly Mirrors Homelander’s Most Unsettling Season 5 Moment
Since its debut, ‘The Boys‘ has carved out a singular reputation in prestige television as a show that wears its political satire on its sleeve without apology. Created by Eric Kripke, the Prime Video series built its entire mythology around the idea that corporate power, unchecked celebrity, and political manipulation could combine to produce something genuinely monstrous. For five seasons, that idea lived safely in the realm of fiction.
With Kripke’s depiction of an all-powerful fascist in ‘The Boys’, it has become impossible not to find parallels in certain current events, and the latest episode continues to serve as an eerie prediction. The show’s fifth and final season has leaned harder than ever into those comparisons, with Homelander, played by Antony Starr, functioning as what Kripke himself has described as an unofficial Trump surrogate within the show’s universe.
The collision between fiction and reality arrived again this week with a jolt. A 22-foot gold-leafed statue of President Donald Trump, dubbed the “Don Colossus,” was erected at the Trump National Doral golf course in Miami. The sculpture depicts Trump raising his right fist in a gesture mirroring the moment he re-emerged after surviving an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania campaign rally in July 2024. The ceremony was led by evangelical pastor Mark Burns, one of Trump’s closest religious allies, who described the statue as a symbol of “resilience, freedom, patriotism, strength, and the willpower to keep fighting.” The statue was funded by a group of crypto investors who commissioned the Trump likeness as part of a promotional push for their memecoin, $PATRIOT, and cost $450,000.
The timing was impossible to ignore. Fans of the Prime Video series reacted to Homelander getting his own gilded likeness in the sixth episode of season five, titled ‘Through the Heavens Fall’, during the same week the real-world statue was being dedicated and blessed in ceremony. Social media erupted almost immediately, with one fan writing, “You can’t make this shit up.”
On Saturday, Kripke acknowledged the deeply unsettling parallel by sharing a side-by-side image of both statues on his Instagram, captioning the post with a simple and profane expression of disbelief. The image captured in the screenshot accompanying this article shows both golden figures standing in poses of almost absurd grandeur, one a fictional supervillain and one the sitting president of the United States, separated only by the fact that one of them is not supposed to be real.
This is not the first time ‘The Boys’ has found itself outpaced by the headlines it was trying to lampoon. Earlier in the season, after Homelander declared himself a god-like figure in episode three, Trump shared an AI-generated image of himself as a Jesus-like figure on Truth Social roughly 48 hours before the episode even premiered.
Speaking to Polygon, Kripke admitted, “I am really tired and weary of the world reflecting the show before we get a chance to do it. I appreciate the marketing. I’m just like, can you just please give us a chance to put some absurd satire out there before you prove that it’s more realistic than we ever intended?”
Kripke has also noted that the current final season was written before the 2024 presidential election, and that it is “really f*cking unsettling” that an upcoming plot point has already happened in real life before the episode even aired. The series finale is set to hit 4DX theaters on May 19, followed by its Prime Video debut the next day. With two episodes to go, the question now hanging over the show is less about what Kripke’s writers might invent next, and more about what reality will dream up before they get the chance.
If a real gold statue being blessed by evangelical leaders in the same week Homelander gets one on television is not enough to convince you that satire has officially lost the plot, share what you think would actually shock Eric Kripke at this point in the comments.
