They are called Valor and Sacrifice. They are two bronze statues that sculptor Leo Friedlander erected in 1929 near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., and that for decades no one looked at twice.
This year Donald Trump ordered them to be covered in gold leaf. The project, completed at the end of July, cost more than 5 million dollars, according to several U.S. media outlets. The White House presented it as a restoration of historic pieces from 1951, but for much of the Senate it was something else: a display of luxury paid for with public funds.
Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker did not stay silent. Booker summed it up bluntly: he criticized spending such a large sum on “gold-plating horse statues” just as the government cuts social programs that support millions of people. CNN revisited the controversy days later, pointing out the same thing many citizens have repeated ever since: five million dollars in gold is a very concrete way of deciding what matters and what does not.
