Pastor Mark Burns, a longtime spiritual adviser to President Donald Trump, wants to make something very clear: The massive golden statue of the president unveiled last week at Trump’s golf resort in Doral, Florida, is not a golden calf.
“It is not even a gold statue,” Burns explained when reached by phone. “It’s a bronze statue that has gold leaf.”
Don’t tell Trump that. “The Real Deal – GOLD – At Doral in Miami,” Trump boasted of the statue in a post on Truth Social. But Burns is right. Don Colossus, capturing a slimmed-down version of Trump raising his fist in the air, was cast in bronze and then painted—a cheaper option than crafting the entire sculpture from gold.
What do the Titleist-clad worshippers of the green—who pay a hefty tithe to wander Trump’s links—think about this gilded idolatry on the golf course? The answer: not much. “I don’t even notice it, to be honest,” one Doral regular told me. “Nobody really talks about it. We just play golf.”
But the idol arrives at a difficult moment for Trump’s relationship with his most religious, most devoted supporters.
In the 2024 election, Trump nabbed a commanding 80% of the white-evangelical vote. The group was instrumental in sending him back to the White House, from the early days of the Republican primary to the general. “They make up, depending on the estimate, upwards of nearly half of primary voters,” CNN data guru Harry Enten told me. “They helped keep [Ron] DeSantis at bay in 2024 in Iowa, which pretty much cut off any chance of a real challenge to Trump.”
New polling has shown serious cracks in Trump’s second term, however: Marist found his disapproval rating among white evangelicals has jumped nine points since December, and an April Fox News poll showed a similarly steep decline in support since the 2024 election.
“That is a massive drop-off,” Enten said.
There are several factors behind this swing in public opinion. In recent weeks, Trump has picked a fight with Pope Leo XIV, praised Allah in a profane Easter Sunday missive, threatened to destroy an entire civilization, and—perhaps most scandalously for the devout—posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus. A Washington Post poll found that 80% of 2024 Trump voters disapproved of that post, which Trump eventually deleted.
Then there’s the war in Iran, whose first day saw the bombing of a girls elementary school that killed more than 180 people, mostly children. In January, a Pew poll found that the share of white evangelicals who are “very confident” Trump acts ethically in office had plunged from 55% at the start of his term to 40%. More than two months later, the war shows few signs of ending, even as gas prices steadily climb.
“I think probably the Iran war has somewhat distorted views of President Trump’s support,” said Pastor Robert Jeffress, a longtime Trump supporter who meets with the president regularly. “Nobody likes higher gasoline prices and problems in the economy.” Jeffress, a right-wing firebrand and Fox News contributor, preaches at the First Baptist Church in Dallas. The megachurch, which finished a $130 million renovation in 2013 and now occupies six city blocks, currently boasts 16,000 members. Three million viewers tune in to watch every Sunday.