An activist art group has staged an exhibit featuring live rats, a jail cell and a Donald Trump impersonator inside a Trump-owned hotel in New York City.

“We feel like he really is the embodiment of a rat in every way, shape or form,” a spokesman for underground art collective InDecline told the Daily News.

“He’s the lowest of the low and we felt to imprison him with his own breed is only right.”

The Daily News reports the group installed the guerrilla art show inside a suite at the Trump International Hotel on Manhattan’s ritzy Central Park West.

The newspaper says seven people showed up at the hotel on Thursday night carrying suitcases filled with supplies.

The cloak-and-dagger project unfolded over the next 24 hours as they transformed the suite into a shocking exhibit featuring a Trump impersonator in a jail cell populated with rats and littered with McDonald’s wrappers.

The group cleaned up the installation before checking out early on Saturday.

A woman who answered the phone at the hotel said she could not comment.

InDecline’s other stunts have included a naked Trump statue it placed in Union Square on the northern edge of Greenwich Village.

-with AAP