Tag Archives: presidential library

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The Donald Trump Presidential Library. Enough!

“ ’Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.“

Percy Bysshe Shelley

UPDATE: 10/14/2025: A Florida court has put on hold the transfer of land held by a Miami college for President Trump’s presidential library, ruling that the college failed to provide reasonable public notice for its board vote to donate the land. The injunction Tuesday temporarily froze the transfer of 2.63 acres to commemorate Trump’s time in the White House. The Miami Dade College land is now a parking lot estimated to be worth more than $67 million, according to county appraisers.

UPDATE: 9/24/2025: NBC News reported today that Trump’s presidential library will be housed in Florida on land currently owned by Miami-Dade College, adjacent to the Freedom Tower and located on the city’s downtown waterfront.

Donald Trump, a man with the reading habits of an illiterate and the attention span of a hummingbird, wants to build a presidential library when he leaves office.

He also wants to fly away in a Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet gifted to the United States by Qatar. When he leaves office he plans to take it with him to his yet-to-be-built presidential library. A submissive Republican-led Congress may let him get away with this normalization of corruption.

The future Trump Presidential Library?
An AI vision.

Trump is already trying to fill an account to build his library.

In December 2024, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million toward the library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. Under the settlement agreement, the payment is described as a “charitable contribution.”

In January 2025, Meta Platforms agreed to settle a lawsuit for $25 million after suspending Trump’s Facebook accounts following the  January 6 attack other U.S. Capitol, with $22 million of that going toward the presidential library.

After his last term in office, a top fundraiser on Trump’s campaign said the president had told supporters he wanted to raise $2 billion for his library. Back then, however, there was considerable skepticism about Trump’s political future or the likelihood of him being able to raise enough money for a library. “I thought to myself, what is this alternative fantasy life you’re living?” one prominent fundraiser said. “I have no clue where they think they’ll get this money raised. Anyone who gives to him will be radioactive.”

How times have changed.

The location of a potential Trump Presidential Library is yet to be determined.  The Washington Post reported at the end of Trump’s first term that sources close to Trump said he planned to build a library and museum in Florida. In March 2025, it was reported that members of Trump’s team were looking at possible sites at  Florida Atlantic University  (FAU) in Palm Beach County, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is located and Florida International University (FIU) near the Trump National Doral Miami golf resort.

Trump’s inaugural committee has also said any money left over from its $250 million haul will go the presidential library, as will millions being paid by individuals to dine and meet with Trump at special events at Mar-a-Lago.

The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund Inc. was incorporated in Florida on December 20, 2024, shortly after the ABC News settlement, and a library website already exists.

As with the The Barack Obama Presidential Center,  the website makes clear that The National Archives will administer the records of the Trump administration (textual, electronic, audiovisual, and artifacts) which will remain at National Archives facilities in the National Capital Region. In other words, there will be no actual presidential library at the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library .

Still to be determined is what Trump’s library will look like, what will be in it or how much it will cost. Obama is still struggling to raise money to compete construction of his presidential center, 3050 days after the end of his presidency. The project has also been beset by controversy, including questions over high “executive compensation” paid to people running the project. The center’s projected cost has also nearly doubled from its original estimate and is now projected at close to $1 billion.  

President Trump, never one to miss an opportunity for an insulting comment, has called the Obama Center “a disaster” and blamed “woke” construction workers” for problems at the site. “I mean look, President Obama — and if he wanted help, I’d give him help because I build on time and on budget,” Trump exclaimed at a White House meeting with  new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney meeting in early May. 2025. Trump has apparently forgotten the six bankruptcies from his over-leveraged hotel and casino businesses in Atlantic City and New York and the destruction of his shuttered 39-story hotel and casino in Atlantic City, N.J. in 30 seconds with controlled explosions in Feb. 2021 .

Given Trump’s ability to generate controversy out of thin air, expect the path toward a Trump Presidential Library to be similarly erratic, filled with drama and leaving disillusioned supporters in its wake.

Of course all this controversy over a jet-themed presidential library would be moot if the practice of building such ego-satisfying monuments that aren’t even real research libraries any more ended once and for all.

As a matter of fact, presidential libraries filled with reading material are a thing of the past anyway.

The Barack Obama Presidential Center under construction, Oct. 2024

The Barack Obama Presidential Center on a 20-acres site in Chicago, if it’s ever finished, isn’t going to have a presidential library. Artifacts and records from Obama’s two terms in the White House are being digitalized and organized by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and will be stored in existing NARA facilities. The only library planned for the site is a new branch of the Chicago Public Library in a massive a 235-foot-tall fortresslike museum tower.

Obama has appealed to a roster of contributors to build his monument, with some heavy hitters donating $25 million or more. If Trump goes ahead with his library plans, he will likely have to copy Obama and initiate a massive fundraising effort to supplement the funds he has already squeezed out of lawsuits.

Is that really what the country needs, more Trump lawsuits to generate cash, an onslaught of solicitations to potential donors large and small, under-the-table deals with donors while Trump is still in office, more inevitable controversy and, in the end, just another monument to the ephemeral nature of political power?

It’s time to end this scattering of presidential shrines across the American landscape, to put a stop to more money-sucking temples to former presidents. With the digitization of records, there will be no need for a vast collection of paper records reminiscent of the warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Sorry, Donald.

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Trump Pursuing a New Tactic to Build His Presidential Library: Lawsuits.

Meta Platforms has agreed to pay about $25 million to settle a lawsuit Trump brought against the company after the social-media platform suspended his accounts following the attacks on the U.S. Capitol that year.

$22 million of the payment will go toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library,. Meta won’t admit wrongdoing under an agreement Trump signed in the Oval Office on Jan. 29.

This follows a Dec. 14 announcement that ABC News would pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump is discouraging. Even more discouraging, however, is word that under the terms of the settlement ABC News will donate the $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum.

And now The New York Times reports many executives at CBS’s parent company, Paramount, believe that settling an absurd $10 billion lawsuit against CBS filed before the Nov. 2024 election would increase the odds that the Trump administration does not block or delay their planned multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance. Trump accused CBS of deceptively editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. 

“A settlement would be an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation,” the Times reported on Jan. 30. 

“We once held the office of president, as well as its occupant, in high regard,” Anthony Clark wrote in The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity, and Enshrine Their Legacies. “As we have lowered our opinions of both, presidential libraries, consequently, have grown larger and more powerful—and, not incidentally, less truthful.” As Clark wrote in Salon, presidential centers tend to be “proud, defensive, and a little self-absorbed” and eventually become theme parks with declining numbers of visitors.

The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund Inc. was incorporated in Florida on Dec. 20, six days after it was revealed that ABC News had agreed to donate the $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum.

The Wall Street Journal’s Annie Linskey and Rebecca Ballhaus reported “Serious talks about the suit, which had seen little activity since the fall of 2023, began after Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida to dine with him in November, according to the people familiar with the discussions. The dinner was one of several efforts by Zuckerberg and Meta to soften the relationship with Trump and the incoming administration. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Last year, Trump warned that Zuckerberg could go to prison if he tried to rig the election against him. Toward the end of the November dinner, Trump raised the matter of the lawsuit, the people said. The president signaled that the litigation had to be resolved before Zuckerberg could be ‘brought into the tent,’ one of the people said.”

Knowing Donald Trump’s tendency toward grandiosity, he will likely want a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious billion dollar Presidential Monument. The Washington Post reported back in January 2021 that a top Trump fundraiser said the president had told supporters he wanted to raise $2 billion for his presidential library and museum and thought he could collect it in small-dollar donations from his grass-roots supporters. A satirical website was subsequently created showing the contents of a potential Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, with images of “The Wall of Criminality” and the “Alt Right Auditorium”. 

The way we’re headed, presidential centers will surpass Egypt’s pyramids as monuments to the egos of leaders. But as I’ve observed in previous posts, if Donald Trump goes forward with his museum plans, his  former, current and future advisors may have reason to be concerned. Many of the Egyptian pyramids entombed not only the deceased, but also the deceased’s servants.

Source: Putnam Museum

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Not ANOTHER Grandiose Presidential Center and Foundation!

The Clinton Foundation isn’t going to be the last money-grubbing institution established by a former president. Another foundation money race is already on.

Hours before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Barak Obama posted a two-minute video on Obama.org calling on Americans to contribute to the Obama Foundation which will oversee the construction of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

obamas-chicago-library

The Obama Foundation will “focus on developing the next generation of citizens — and what it means to be a good citizen in the 21st century,” according to obama.org.

The Obama Foundation will try to raise money from the public to build and help maintain the Barack Obama Presidential Center. The Foundation has already raised $7.3 million at the end of 2015. The fundraising total for 2016 hasn’t been disclosed. The Center is expected to cost $1 billion.

“We once held the office of president, as well as its occupant, in high regard,” Anthony Clark wrote in his book, The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity, and Enshrine Their Legacies. “As we have lowered our opinions of both, presidential libraries, consequently, have grown larger and more powerful—and, not incidentally, less truthful.”

Writing in Salon, Clark said presidential centers tend to be “proud, defensive, and a little self-absorbed” that eventually become theme parks with declining numbers of visitors.

With that in mind, it is discouraging to see the number of extravagant presidential centers continue to grow. Do we really need another library and recklessly large foundation funded by influence seekers and built by a legacy-hungry ex-president?

Unfortunately, each successive administration seems to think its library needs to be more grandiose than its predecessor.

The 135,000 sq. ft. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, including endowment of an Institute at Harvard for the study of politics and public affairs, cost $20.8 million. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $72.1 million.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Center for Public Affairs, the largest of all the presidential libraries, cost $60 million. Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to a little more than $130 million now.

Obama’s $1 billion project would be twice what George W. Bush raised for his library and its programs.

It would also be more than the $165 million spent on William J. Clinton’s Presidential Center and Park in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Obama’s massive fundraising effort may well lead to all the same conflicts and questions associated with the Clinton Foundation.

It’s time to stop this arms race of ever-expanding presidential libraries and foundations.