Melania Trump statue is missing in her hometown in Slovenia

“Melania” appeared on the banks of the Sava river in July 2020, four months before her human inspiration left the White House.

Now, four months after the former Melanija Knavs resumed the house at the most famous address of Washington, her avatar of life has made an unworthy exit of her Slovenian birth city, Sevnica.

The only thing that remains of the massive bronze statue are the feet and the two-meter-long tree stump on which they stood.

The symmetry would probably rely on the erratic American director Wes Anderson – who often contains bizarre robberies in his films. But even in his back catalog there has never been anything like the case of the cursed First Lady statue.

Because this is not the first time that a tribute to Melania Trump has met a sticky end in Sevnica.

The first iteration was unveiled in July 2019. Released from a single piece of wood by a local traditional chainsaw called Ales “Maxi” Zupevc, it took a year before a non-inspired perpetrator decided to make a fourth July.

Fortunately, the American artist Brad Downey – who ordered Maxi to make the wooden original – had already made a cast of the statue. It made a good comeback in bronze, on the same site.

At his revelation, Mr Downey said that the new version was designed to “be as solid as possible, from a sustainable material that cannot be deliberately destroyed”.

But it turns out that it can be chopped and removed from the ankles.

Local police say that they deal with “Melania’s” disappearance as “theft” and started an investigation.

Brad Downey has always insisted that his work was political. He chose Maxi as an employee because his upbringing was comparable to that of the First Lady.

And he argued that Melania Trump benefited from a rapid American citizenship process, while other immigrants members under the “xenophobic” policy of her husband.

Now he suspects the disappearance of the statue “has something to do with Trump that is re -elected”.

In the meantime, the local authorities in Sevnica have mixed feelings. They condemned “any form of interference with private or public ownership”.

But they added: “The image of the American First Lady was not something that someone was proud of”.