This famous golden toilet, once offered to Trump, just sold at auction for $12.1 million

A 220-pound, fully functional, solid-gold toilet—once offered to President Donald Trump as a satirical gift—just sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $12.1 million.

The commode is a work of art called America created by Maurizio Cattelan in 2016. Cattelan is most well-known for his surreal, conversation-starting, and often controversial art concepts, like the 1999 piece La Nona Ora, which depicts a life-size Pope John Paul II getting struck by a meteorite, or the infamous 2019 piece Comedian, which is, put simply, a banana taped to a wall (which sold at auction for $6.2 million).

After America debuted at the Guggenheim Museum in September 2016, it became an instant subject of public fascination, inspiring dozens of think pieces and even a front cover of the New York Post. In the nine years since, the intrigue surrounding the work has only grown after it was the target of a high-profile heist. 

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of America, though, will be its emergence as a striking symbol for Trump’s first term—a connection made even more poignant by the timing of its sale during Trump’s second term, itself most visually recognizable by its glut of gilded motifs.

The storied, sometimes unbelievable history of America

When it debuted to the public, America was not sequestered on a pedestal or inside a gallery space. Instead, it was located in the Guggenheim’s bathroom, where visitors were allowed five minutes each to, as one New York Post article put it at the time, “crap all over America.” In all, more than 100,000 guests lined up to do just that. 

At the time, the Guggenheim said that the artwork represented the American dream, with “its utility ultimately reminding us of the inescapable physical realities of our shared humanity.” Cattelan put it more bluntly to The New Yorker: “Whatever you eat, a two-hundred-dollar lunch or a two-dollar hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” he said.

In 2019, the loo was sent to England’s Blenheim Palace, where it was to be put on view to the public for a second time. Just as the exhibition was set to open, a group of thieves broke into the palace, used sledgehammers and crowbars to pry the toilet out of the floor, and escaped in under five minutes. 

Two of the people involved in the theft were sentenced to prison in June of this year, but the original America has never been recovered. The America that just sold at Sotheby’s is actually a second version of the work, which Cattelan had previously alluded to but did not reveal in public until the sale. According to Sotheby’s, it’s the only other version of America in existence.

An 18-karat-gold throne

In a new YouTube video about the whirlwind history of America, several Sotheby’s experts note that Cattelan’s reticence to provide much context about America is one of the reasons it became iconic. But the toilet’s connections to Trump were never exactly subtle. 

When America arrived at the Guggenheim just two months before Trump was elected in 2016, the museum’s then-blogger, Caitlin Dover, wrote in a post, “The aesthetics of this ‘throne’ recall nothing so much as the gilded excess of Trump’s real-estate ventures and private residences.” When Dover asked Cattelan about the connection, he said that while Trump wasn’t top of mind when he conceived the piece, “it was probably in the air.” 

The allusion got a lot more explicit in 2018. That year, the Trump administration contacted the Guggenheim to request that the Vincent van Gogh painting Landscape With Snow be borrowed for Trump’s private living quarters. According to The Washington Post, then-curator Nancy Spector, who wrote a book about Cattelan’s work in 1999, declined to lend the painting, suggesting America instead. The White House, it seems, did not respond to the subtle act of protest.

A gilded symbol

Trump’s penchant for gold decor dates back decades. In 2004, he told reporters that the reign of Louis XIV represented his “favorite style”—and the gilded, rococo-esque aesthetic has become a visual hallmark of both his presidencies. This year alone, Trump has decked out the Oval Office in golden objects, accepted a luxury jet from Qatar filled with gold furniture, and begun construction on a new White House ballroom that will be, predictably, very gold. 

In some ways, a golden toilet feels like the ultimate symbol of a second term in which Trump has repeatedly strengthened his ties with billionaire investors while the average American is in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. But when asked about the goal behind agreeing to offer America to the Trump family in 2018, Cattelan told The Post that his reasoning was a bit more lighthearted. 

“What’s the point of our life?” he said at the time. “Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.”