What Even Is a Trump Presidential Library?

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A week ago, a plot of incredibly valuable land in downtown Miami belonged to public Miami Dade College. It doesn't look like much — it is, in fact, a parking lot at the moment. But it sits directly next to the iconic Freedom Tower, and is within shouting distance of Biscayne Bay, the Miami Heat's arena, and various other downtown landmarks. It is, even with just the parking spaces in place, likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Today, that land belongs to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation. Miami Dade College gifted the plot to the state of Florida last week, apparently at the sudden request of the state and without public input or discussion of any kind. Then on Tuesday, Ron DeSantis and his small cabinet voted unanimously — after a discussion, per the New York Times, of "less than three minutes" — to pass the land on to the Trump nonprofit, which is run by Eric Trump and a few other family members.

This is not, I suppose, entirely abnormal on its face. In the past, various universities have vied to host other presidents' eventual libraries, though it is safe to say none of the land in question had the value of a spot with views of Biscayne Bay. The difference, of course, is that Donald Trump has not even a shred of interest in a "library."

There has been controversy over these institutions before, with some arguing that presidential libraries only add to the hagriographic reverence this country has long held for its chief executives, the kind of reverence that leads to post-Watergate pardons and, eventually, apparently straight-faced rulings regarding presidential immunity. But these monuments to presidential power do also follow some relatively basic rules: they act more like museums than libraries in the neighborhood sense, with exhibits and artifacts from the president in question's life and term, and also do function as places for historical archival research. Presidencies generate a lot of documents; this is where to find them, to at least some extent.

I conducted some of that research at two presidential libraries a few years back — the Reagan library, in Simi Valley, and the Nixon library, in Yorba Linda, both in California. (This was for a potential book project on the history of presidential science advisors; it generated this fun piece on the batshit letters these advisors would receive over the years, but no book as of yet. Publishers, if this sort of thing interests you, you know where to find me.) They were both pleasant places, not exceptionally grand or extravagant as far as I could tell. What they definitively did not have, in keeping with the other dozen or so presidential libraries in the National Archives system, is a massive hotel and condos worth billions of dollars.

The gifted land the Trumps' foundation now owns came with very limited restrictions or requirements. The property, which takes up 2.63 acres, has space for what the Times says could be "several towers;" only certain "components" of that space would actually need to house a library or museum. The rest, as long as construction starts within five years, is at the whims of the griftiest family that ever did grift.

"Consistent with our families [sic] DNA, this will be one of the most beautiful buildings ever built, an Icon on the Miami skyline," Eric Trump posted this week. Experts on Miami real estate think the best and most likely use of the site will be to build at least one extremely tall tower capable of containing 2,500 condo units. Just imagine how big the sign on the side will be.

And there have already been ample indications that the concept of a "library," to this particular president, is little more than a way to keep a bunch of the shit he thinks belongs to him anyway. He already got in trouble (well, sort of) once for just grabbing some boxes of stuff from the White House and dumping it in a Mar-A-Lago bathroom; now he'll get to do it again, legally.

Then there's the plane. One of the biggest individual grifts in a presidency full of them comes via Qatar, who donated a gold-encrusted 747 to Trump in a supposedly "unconditional" gift. It will probably cost $1 billion to retrofit into usable Air Force One status, a process that will last through most or all of Trump's term. What then? It will go straight to the Trump presidential library; it is a safe bet that this won't function like the previous Air Force One on display at the Reagan library, which was sent only after decommissioning and was opened to the public only months after Reagan himself died. In entirely unrelated news, Trump signed an executive order this week pledging NATO-level military support to Qatar.

That's what the "library" will be in this case: a legal-on-its-face way for a lifetime scam artist to continue scamming the American public even after he, hopefully, leaves office. He will fly around on a billion-dollar gift ostensibly given to us, and point out the gilded window at the 100-story monstrosity festooned with a giant "TRUMP" sign and tiny "library" sign when he bothers to justify it at all.

Again, there are reasonable discussions to be had about the many millions of dollars of both public and private money spent on shrines to people who held a job that is literally impossible to do without some moral stain or other. And while there was certainly some degree of self-indulgent pride behind it, Franklin Roosevelt's contention, in helping create the modern presidential library system, that his collected papers might be a useful "subject of study by historians, political scientists, economists, sociologists, and other scholars" was not a selfish idea.

Again in utterly unrelated news: This week the head of the Eisenhower library was forced from his job after objecting to a Trump administration attempt to steal a sword from the collection to give to King Charles.

Imagine a historian ten years from now, wandering in some side door to the supposed archive to do a bit of research on what, exactly, happened with that whole hurricanes-and-sharpies thing, and needing to dodge hosts of Palm Beach car dealership owners paying $1,125 a night for rooms facing away from the bay on their way to a $25,000-a-plate dinner at which the former president who has not been seen without a ventilator in 18 months has promised to gladhand the donors. The documents our lonely historian requested will, of course, not be available.