‘Baby Trump’ protest balloon becomes a museum piece — literally
LONDON — The “Baby Trump” protest balloon will live on long after its namesake has left the White House.
The Museum of London said Monday that it had added the giant balloon — which depicts Trump as a screaming orange-colored baby — to its collection as an artifact from the protests that greeted him when he visited the city in 2018.
“By collecting the baby blimp, we can mark the wave of feeling that washed over the city that day and capture a particular moment of resistance,” Sharon Ament, the museum’s director, said in a statement.
The blimp will become part of the museum’s protest collection, which includes items from the women’s suffrage movement, the campaign against the war in Iraq during the early 2000s and more recent protests against public spending cuts.
The Trump blimp was designed by a group of friends who met in a London pub to discuss how they could speak out against his administration’s policies. What they came up with was a giant balloon that caricatured Trump as a petulant diapered baby clutching a smartphone and topped by a quiff of yellow hair.
The blimp flew outside the Palace of Westminster, where Parliament meets, on July 13, 2018, when thousands of demonstrators crammed the streets of central London to protest Trump’s visit to the British capital.
Protesters in Britain on Friday did not mince words regarding their objection to President Trump.
The balloon spawned replicas that flew over San Francisco in September 2019 and in the skies of Tuscaloosa, Ala., two months later. The blimp in the latter incident was knifed and deflated by a presumed Trump supporter.
“We hope the baby’s place in the museum will stand as a reminder of when London stood against Trump, but will prompt those who see it to examine how they can continue the fight against the politics of hate,” the blimp’s creators said in a statement.
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