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By Mihar Dias October 2026
There are many ways to embarrass a president. You can defeat him at the ballot box, challenge his policies, or write an angry newspaper column. Or, if you happen to be a Danish artist with a particularly mischievous sense of humour, you can put him in front of the European Parliament without a stitch of clothing.
That is essentially what artist Jens Galschiøt has done. An eight-foot, 23-carat-gold statue of Donald Trump has appeared in the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Trump is naked, holding a golf club and the scales of justice, while sitting on the back of a much smaller man. https://metro.co.uk/2026/10/07/naked-statue-donald-trump-unveiled-called-orange-plague-29687148/?
The sculpture, titled The Orange Plague, invokes Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes and is intended as political satire.
Now imagine trying that in Malaysia. The first question would probably not be whether the statue was artistically significant. It would be whether the artist had obtained the appropriate approval. And there, in miniature, is the Malaysian version of The Emperor's New Clothes.
We have developed a remarkably sophisticated wardrobe for political power: honorific's, motorcades, official portraits, elaborate ceremonies, carefully arranged seating and speeches that can take longer to acknowledge the distinguished guests than to explain why they have gathered.
There is nothing wrong with ceremony. Institutions need dignity. Public office deserves respect. But sometimes the costume becomes so elaborate that questioning the person underneath begins to look almost impolite.
Malaysia is particularly good at this distinction. We can be ferocious about politicians belonging to the other camp, while becoming strangely philosophical when our own side is mocked. A joke is “free speech” until it lands too close to home; then someone discovers that it is “irresponsible”, “provocative” or “insensitive”.
“Sensitive” is an especially useful word because it can cover almost anything: race, religion, royalty, national institutions, public order or the simple fact that somebody important did not enjoy the joke.
The Strasbourg statue cuts through all that ceremony. Take away the presidency, the motorcade, the security detail, the flags and the carefully composed photograph, and suddenly there is only a human being on a pedestal, available for ridicule.
That is what satire does. It strips power of its costume.
The Malaysian Bar has noted that Article 10 of the Federal Constitution protects freedom of speech and expression, subject to constitutionally permitted restrictions, and has argued that artistic expression should be answered through criticism and counter-expression rather than simply suppressed. . https://www.malaysianbar.org.my/article/news/press-statements/press-statements/press-release-respect-our-constitutional-freedom-of-speech-assembly-and-association?utm_source=chatgpt.com
The principle matters because political satire is not supposed to be comfortable. Its job is to make power uncomfortable.
Imagine an eight-foot golden statue of a senior Malaysian politician sitting on the back of an exhausted member of the rakyat, holding a golf club in one hand and the scales of justice in the other. Imagine that it was exhibited in a public institution and openly mocked the distance between political power and those carrying its consequences.
Would we laugh?
Or would we first ask who approved the exhibition?
That is the more revealing question.
A healthy democracy does not require politicians to be treated as sacred objects. In fact, there is something reassuring about a political culture in which the powerful can be mocked without the machinery of the state suddenly taking an interest.
The European sculpture also exposes the strange fragility of political grandeur. The “leader of the free world” may command armies, sign executive orders and dominate international headlines, yet an artist can reduce all that majesty to a naked figure on a pedestal.
No presidential seal can prevent an artist from changing the frame.
That is the peculiar power of art. Politics says, “Look at me as an institution.” Art sometimes replies, “No. Look at you as a human being.”
And that brings us back to Andersen.
The important characters in The Emperor's New Clothes are not really the emperor or even the child. They are everyone else: the courtiers who know what they see but pretend otherwise, and the crowd that goes along because nobody wants to be the first to say it.
The child merely breaks the agreement. https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-andersen/short-story/the-emperors-new-clothes
There is a lesson here for Malaysia. The danger is not that politicians are mocked. The danger is that citizens become so accustomed to political deference that laughing at power begins to feel more dangerous than exercising it.
We do not have to agree with every cartoon, statue or deliberately provocative artwork. A free society is not one in which nobody is offended. It is one in which offence does not automatically become a reason to silence the offender.
Perhaps that is the real significance of putting a naked golden Trump inside the European Parliament. The joke is about Trump, but the larger subject is power itself. Strip away the titles, ceremonies, costumes and institutional grandeur and ask what remains. Then ask whether the people carrying that power can tolerate being looked at without the costume.
Malaysia could do worse than asking the same question. We probably do not need a golden statue of a naked politician. We already have enough political monuments.
What we need is the considerably more modest figure of a citizen who can stand in the middle of the room and say, without fear or ceremony:
The emperor has no clothes.
And, ideally, not have to check first whether saying so requires a permit.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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