A Library Fit for a Pharaoh

Trump's plan for an outsize monument to his presidency is causing heartburn in Miami.

My wife and I popped down to warm and sunny Miami a few days ago, not to escape the recent cold spell up north, but to expand our cultural horizons. Really.

We wanted to experience Miami Art Week, a festival of creativity and commerce that has grown over the past decade or so to include not just an offshoot of the famed Art Basel, but 19 other art fairs as well. Also, countless lectures, museum tours, parties, receptions and other celebrations of the visual arts. It’s like spring break, only for wealthy adults instead of horny college students.

But just as we arrived, something happened that made it hard for me to keep my mind on art. The trustees of Miami Dade College voted to hand over a 2.63-acre plot of land it owns to the state of Florida, which give it to a foundation set up by Donald Trump associates to build his future presidential library. In return, the college gets... absolutely nothing.

Why would an unassuming commuter school want to bless a wealthy president with such an expensive gift? Real estate experts in this booming city put the land’s value as high as $360 million – money that would surely be better spent educating MDC’s 120,000 students

The plot, used currently as a parking lot for the school’s downtown campus, overlooks Biscayne Bay and adjoins the famous Freedom Tower. That graceful 1925 office building was commandeered by the city in the 1960s to process half a million Cubans fleeing the regime of Fidel Castro.

For many of those refugees, the 17-story tower was one of the first things they saw as their boats approached. Now an art and design museum, it is regarded fondly by the 30% of Miamians of Cuban heritage — many of them students at Miami Dade College.

The only undisputed explanation I could find for the giveaway is that most of MDC’s seven trustees were appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump-friendly Republican. In fact, they voted for it once before, but a judge ordered a do-over after a local historian sued to block the deal.

The Trump project is not popular in Miami. A recent poll found that only 14% of voters support the land giveaway, while 74% are opposed. At a noisy public hearing the day I arrived, dozens of people complained that the deal is unfair to the college (its entire endowment is barely half the land parcel’s value) and — given Trump’s immigration policies — insulting to the school’s heavily Hispanic student body.

Supporters argue that having a presidential library in Miami would bring millions of visitors, enrich the local economy and, as a repository of presidential documents, facilitate research for local faculty and students. That latter point is borne out by examples elsewhere, though exactly what should constitute a presidential library is a bit vague.

For most of U.S. history, the papers and memorabilia of outgoing presidents were considered their private property. Then Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to give his records to the nation, and in 1941 he donated a building — now the FDR Presidential Library and Museum — at his Hyde Park, NY, home to house them.

Today, the U.S. Office of Presidential Libraries, part of the National Archives and Records Administration, administers 16 such institutions, one for every president since Herbert Hoover. Barack Obama’s, set to open next spring in Chicago, will be the 17^th. Several pre-Hoover chief executives have libraries built with private or state-government funds.

Trump’s effort got rolling earlier this year with the establishment of a foundation that aims to raise $1 billion within the next year or so. That’s about 50 times what Obama’s library fund collected in its first three years.

Why so much? Probably because Trump’s plan would redefine the concept of a presidential library. People involved in the project say it would be a 47-story tower (for our 47^th President) that includes a hotel, offices, shops, restaurants and enough room for the Boeing 747 jetliner given to him by the government of Qatar. There would also be legally required space for presidential papers and memorabilia, but only on the first few floors. The rest would be commercial.

In fairness, 47 stories is modest for a new building in Miami these days. The city now boasts the third-biggest skyline in the U.S. (after New York City and Chicago), with nearly 70 buildings of 47 or more floors and several monsters of at least 85 stories on the way. Though federal law mandates access to official papers, it doesn’t say anything about how much space they require or what else a presidential library can or cannot contain.

Sure, Trump got into trouble after he left office in 2020 for taking thousands of official documents with him and then hiding them at his Mar-a-Lago estate. But he is notoriously obsessed with his reputation, so a monument dedicated to that subject will be impressively pharaonic no matter what. Besides, a 1978 law passed in response to Richard Nixon’s Watergate shenanigans made presidential papers public property open to all and penalizes mishandling.

In any case, the project isn’t a done deal. The local historian’s lawsuit goes to trial in August. And, though the library foundation has already raised millions — including Trump’s legal settlements with the media companies he has sued — it’s clear that $1 billion is a tall stack of money. The day after I left Miami, voters elected the city’s first Democratic mayor in 30 years — a bad omen for a Republican who might need help with zoning and construction issues.

Oh, and University of Miami researchers found last year that several area skyscrapers are sinking at an alarming rate. Unlike, say, Manhattan with its granite bedrock, much of south Florida is built on sand, silt, peat and other relatively soft materials.

Whatever you think about our outgoing President, he is entitled to a proper presidential library. But the sheer weight of a 47-story skyscraper — one that tries to combine history and profit — could turn Trump’s tower into something he hadn’t counted on: a monument that diminishes, literally and otherwise, as time goes by.