Usually, the statues are lifesize, although Cottrill has produced a couple of “ten-footers”, of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Then, in August, he got a call from a sculptor in Las Vegas. The caller said: “Hey, do you want to do a 15ft Trump statue?”

“I said: ‘Yeah.’ He said: ‘Well, I’ve got a group of cryptocurrency guys from Canada — or at least the main guy is from Canada. I’ll get him on the phone.’ This was a Saturday night. Within an hour, about ten phone calls back and forth, we agreed on a price and a schedule.”

One of these cryptocurrency patrons said the group was mostly from the United States. Their giant bronze Trump, for which they paid about $400,000, is to be unveiled before his inauguration in Washington on January 20.

Another member of the group, Dustin Stockton, in Florida, described the buyers as “a crew of crypto bros” who got together after the attempted assassination last year of Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“It was a turning point in world history,” Stockton said. “Sometimes I sit and reflect on how different the world would have been if the bullet hadn’t hit his ear and had blown his brains out on live TV. It’s important to commemorate these world-changing events. It would have been a full-blown civil war, the complete collapse of society.”

Stockton, 43, used to play poker for a living. He got into politics as part of the Tea Party movement and worked for the 2012 presidential campaign of Newt Gingrich and then for Steve Bannon, the Trump aide and strategist.

He led a fundraising campaign for Trump’s proposed border wall that raised $25 million and later prompted a federal investigation that led to fraud and money laundering charges against Bannon and several others — Bannon was pardoned by Trump but still faces state charges.

Stockton said he was never charged, but found himself barred from holding a bank account. “There was no due process,” he said. “For me, crypto became a matter of survival.”

Trump, who once derided cryptocurrency as a scam, has voiced steadily greater support for it. Stockton said the crypto bros wanted a statue of Trump rising to his feet after the hail of bullets and raising a clenched fist. The idea was to capture “one of the most iconic moments and to show our appreciation of his embrace of crypto”, he said.

All agreed that “if we are going to do this, we had to make it Trumpian,” Stockton said. “We couldn’t do lifesize.”

He wanted a latter-day Colossus of Rhodes, a Trumpian version of the figure that guarded a harbour and became one of the wonders of the ancient world. “I have been calling the statue The Don Colossus,” he said.

It was equally obvious, to Stockton, that “we couldn’t do it in aluminium”. Ideally they would have used gold, but “gold is too soft a metal to do that large,” he said. “Bronze was the only thing that made sense and Alan was the only artist that made sense. We had to go with someone who already had the Edison statue in Statuary Hall. Someone who had the chops, the gravitas.”

Cottrill is an army veteran who founded an international pizza chain. Then, at the age of 38, he was knocked from his motorbike by a drunk driver. “The police chief found him on his back, holding his leg on,” said his son Brent, 42. “He said: ‘That’s the toughest son of a bitch he’s ever met.’”

Cottrill recalls that when he awoke in hospital and was told that he was going to live, “I turned to his mother,” he said, nodding towards Brent, “and I said: ‘All I want to do is sculpt.’”

Leaving her in charge of the pizza chain, he went to New York and began sculpting from nine in the morning until ten at night, enrolling in two art schools and studying anatomy among the cadavers at the Columbia Medical Center. Then he moved back to Zanesville, buying a large brick building that once housed a local newspaper.

It is now his studio and gallery, filled with hundreds of sculptures, including a pair of elaborate bronze tombs that he has made for himself and his wife, decorated with inspirational quotes from Cottrill and from Shakespeare, and lined with the faces of their six children. The gallery is Zanesville’s top tourist attraction, according to Tripadvisor.

There, in August, Cottrill set to work on a lifesize model of Trump, building a tubular steel structure on to which he added Styrofoam and then clay. At the time, he did not think Trump would win the election and he thought it best to get as much of the statue done as possible. “I thought: ‘He’s going to lose and you guys are going to squelch on the last bit of money,” he said.

To save time, he used a real belt for Trump’s trousers and buttons for his shirt and on the clay figure’s feet, a pair of leather shoes, acquired from a charity shop. A US flag pin rides the lapel of the clay president’s suit.

“I had him looking more like he does today,” said Cottrill. His patrons suggested a few alterations, that he “ought to take a little bit of that off the neck and maybe his cheeks need to be just a little bit smaller,” he said. With living subjects, “almost always I get that,” he said. “If it’s a woman, forget about it. She always comes out 30 or 40 pounds lighter.”

Stockton acknowledged that the crypto bros had asked for adjustments. “We definitely wanted to make Trump look good,” he said. “Take off a few pounds, add a few bulges in the right places.”

This clay model of Trump, as slim and square-jawed as John Wayne, was placed before a 3D scanner. The images were sent to a factory in Detroit, which produced large plates of a waxy composite that together made up the shell of a figure 15ft high. These were delivered to the foundry at Leasure’s hay farm. There they were dipped in ceramic. The wax was melted out, bronze was poured into the ceramic moulds, and on November 1, out came the first of 52 pieces of the giant bronze Trump.

The colossus was assembled from its feet upwards and then laid horizontal as it got larger so that the welders could work on the chest and back and the raised arm, until it looked as if Trump was lying in bed. The clenched fist might have been reaching to pull the cord of a nightlight.

Last Thursday, the bronze workers welded on the head. Then the giant Trump lay in the foundry shed, like Ozymandias in the sand, “the wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command” all directed towards the concrete floor. To mangle Percy Bysshe Shelley: Look upon him, you liberals, and despair.

On Monday afternoon, a crane hook attached to a sturdy bracket the workers had welded on to the back, between the giant’s shoulder plates, and the enormous Trump was lifted to its feet. “It’s hard to get a realisation of how big it is until it is stood up,” said Dan Minosky, 38, one of the bronze workers. “Once it got stood up, it towers.”

Minosky and the other workers lent against work benches, gazing up at it. Rain hammered the tin roof. A calico cat crept across the foundry behind the legs of the giant Trump.

Donald Mason, the mayor of Zanesville, came by to see it too. He is a Donald, and a Republican political leader. Did he ever imagine a statue of himself? “Well,” he said, staring up at the giant Trump. “I hope not for a while because I want to stay alive.”

Usually, Cottrill applies chemicals to the bronze to give it a dark patina. “I like the traditional look,” he said. “But this, it’s got to be gold.”

So the foundry workers began polishing and buffing the giant Trump, to make it shine. “I sanded his legs, over and over and over,” said Cottrill’s son Brent. Dark greenish dust from the bronze Trump coated his forehead and cheeks. He brushed a hand through a smooth, glowing valley in one of Trump’s trouser legs, near his shin. “This is what you want, right here,” he said.

Higher up, above the crotch, the bronze was still dull and mottled but there were bright lines across the chest where the welding seams between the plates had been ground down and buffed smooth. Tap with your knuckles on a thigh and the giant Trump rings like a gong.

It weighs 2,000lb. Leasure, 72, the foundry owner and hay farmer, said the statue had a steel frame inside it that would lock into two plates, at the feet, with pipes beneath them to root it into a concrete plate. The plate is being made by a builder who is one of his neighbours.

“Remember when Saddam Hussein had his statue pulled over and it broke off at his knees?” he said. “This one won’t break off at the knee.”

The Trump statue is too large to be transported upright, so it will be laid down on a 30ft trailer to be towed to Washington. One of the crypto bros had noted that if the statue was rotated onto its side, with its raised fist, it would look rather like Superman in flight, Stockton said.

He is not yet sure where it will stand at the inauguration. “I have been speaking with members of the inaugural committee and their staff for the last several weeks,” he said. “I get the sense that President Trump is personally involved … We have joked about making sure it is in shot when President Biden departs on Marine Force One.”

He is not worried about suggestions that a giant statue for a still-living president might look like the artefact of a dictator. “I have long referred to Donald Trump as the greatest internet troll of all time,” he said. “It’s part of why he’s always been so entertaining. We actually look forward to the horror and the negative reactions.”

After the inauguration, Stockton said the statue would embark on what he is calling “The Victory Tour”, a two-year journey across America. “I think I’m going to be driving [the truck],” he said. Then he hopes to find a permanent place for it. “My personal hope is that it will be part of the Trump presidential library at some point, five or six years from now.”

And then, it could survive millennia, Cottrill said. “Have you ever seen the Bronzes of Riace?” he asked, referring to two bronze warriors cast in about 450 BC. “They were dredged up from the Mediterranean Sea.” They still look fabulous.

The bronze Donald “may be dug up, 5,000 years from now, and people will say: ‘Oh! That’s that guy who, back in the 21st century, had a huge impact on the democratic experiment that was the United States of America,” he said. “I’m not saying for good or bad,” he added, carefully.

He is satisfied with the work. “This piece gave me the opportunity to invoke a sense of strength and power and defiance,” he said, gazing up at the shiny colossus he had wrought. “That’s what they wanted projected, that’s what I strove to do. And I think it’s successful, any personal feelings aside.”

Another of his statues, a far smaller figure, stood on a nearby trolley. It was Scipio Smith, a freed slave who founded a tinsmith shop and a church. “Those are the statues I love to do,” he said. “Somebody who picked himself up from nothing and made something of himself.”

He turned, theatrically, and glanced up at the golden Trump. “What?” he exclaimed, when everyone laughed. “I didn’t say anything!”