Well, if you needed a visual metaphor for the Trump-era United States, you couldn't really do better than this.
A replica of the iconic Statue of Liberty in Brazil was recently caught on camera toppling over in extremely high winds, and the internet can't help but feel like it's some kind of omen.
Recent storms with wind gusts exceeding 90 km/h, or 56 mph, lashed the city of Guaiba, Brazil, in the country’s Porto Alegre region, with enough power to topple the replica.
The clip instantly went viral because it is rather... bracing. The nearly 80-foot statue was absolutely huge and it stood in a parking lot, meaning cars were driving by at the time of its collapse.
The statue is a symbol of the Brazilian retailer Havan, and it stood outside one of its branches in a retail area of the city. You can tell from the video that it was one heck of a storm racing through, with trees bending and clouds racing across the sky.
But it doesn't seem like such a huge statue should be able to be toppled by mere wind, right? And for most people online, what really struck them was not the shocking video, but the seeming symbolism it contains.
There's the statue itself, of course, which is symbol enough. But the golden arches of a McDonald's behind it really hammers home the image of American collapse.
And given Trump's obsession with Mickey D's, it's hard not to view that detail as significant, like a sign from the universe that the McDonald's addict will imminently collapse America once and for all. Or something.
Of course, it's just as possible and far more likely that this means nothing and there was just a storm that caused an accident.
But on social media, the symbolism of the statue's collapse was hard to ignore.
This statue may be the most viral, but it is not the first to meet an untimely demise. Eagle-eyed X users also spied a clip from September in which one of the statues at another Havan location was set ablaze.
This symbolism is about as subtle as a brick to the face, as they say.
@WhiteHouse/X
