President Trump’s presidential library, planned as a gilded glass tower on a donated chunk of Miami waterfront, is designed to be what Eric Trump, the president’s middle son, calls “a lasting testament to an amazing man.” If the president has his way, it will also serve as a monument to his norm-busting conduct in office.
Mr. Trump had said that the $1 billion project, the priciest presidential library yet, could include a hotel and retail sales outlets. But more disturbing to historians and government watchdogs is his determination to own and control every document a presidential library would contain. Not since the Watergate era, when President Richard M. Nixon took his fight to control the incriminating White House tapes to the Supreme Court, has a president worked so hard to shield documentary evidence of his administration’s inner workings from public view.
For eight decades, presidential libraries have served as public research centers run by the National Archives and Records Administration, the custodian of presidential records that by law belong to the American people. But Mr. Trump, who was indicted on charges of hiding classified government documents in his Mar-a-Lago estate after his first term, views those records as his personal property.
Justice Department policy bars prosecuting a sitting president, so after Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, Jack Smith, the special counsel in the documents case, dismissed criminal charges against Mr. Trump for mishandling the classified documents and obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them. Last year Mr. Trump regained control of the thousands of items the F.B.I. seized in 2022 from Mar-a-Lago.
This April Mr. Trump and the Justice Department advanced a sweeping legal claim that he, not the public, owns his records. The opinion, written by a Trump loyalist in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, declares unconstitutional the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which was enacted after Watergate to require the safeguarding of all documents chronicling presidents’ official duties.
The opinion argues that the act limits the “constitutional independence and autonomy” of the executive branch and would grant Mr. Trump, who has torn up and flushed documents down the toilet, sole control over what presidential records survive, or see the light of day.
Government watchdog groups sued the White House, seeking the courts’ help in preserving the records for the public. On May 20, Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rejected Mr. Trump’s position in a ruling that opened by referencing a line from the dystopian novel “1984” by George Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
The White House is not giving up. “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in history. He is committed to preserving records from his historic time in office,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in an email.
“While we will comply with Judge Bates’ ruling, we will also appeal his decision.”
A Library Arms Race
The first president to establish a library was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1941 dedicated a library on his Hyde Park, N.Y. estate. It would be run by the National Archives, established at Roosevelt’s urging with the mission to preserve historical records and to promote Americans’ understanding of shared history. For four decades, presidents followed Roosevelt’s lead.
“The archetypal modern presidential library uses art, objects, documents and new technology to educate people about the era that a president grew up and served in, as well as what he did to meet the demands of his time,” Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, said in an interview.
The roughly 2,500 employees of the National Archives work to preserve, organize and release to the public documents generated from across the federal government. The agency spends $92 million annually to operate 16 presidential libraries under its jurisdiction.
As more money has flowed into politics, presidential libraries have grown in ambition and scale. Presidential historians say the apotheosis so far of library fund-raising is the Obama Presidential Center, scheduled to open in Chicago next month. A towering, $850 million edifice dubbed the “Obamalisk,” the center and its 19-acre campus will house a collection of former President Barack Obama’s and Michelle Obama’s personally commissioned art, a “teaching kitchen” and basketball court, but no presidential records.
Mr. Obama was the first former president to seek a divorce from the National Archives, in part to avoid a federal requirement that presidents raise endowment funds for their libraries, which partly pay the National Archives for running them. In 2008, the year Mr. Obama was elected, Congress tripled the endowment fund-raising requirement to 60 percent of the total cost of constructing and equipping a presidential library.
Mr. Obama rejected plans for the National Archives to operate inside his library, saying that nearly all of his presidential records were already digitized. Instead, Obama administration records are stored in one of the archives’ own facilities outside Washington in College Park, Md.
Many presidential historians have criticized the Obama approach. They say the educational value of presidential libraries relies on their housing a full federal research facility — a professionally maintained collection of papers, letters, photos, recordings and ephemera from presidents, staff and private donors — available in a single location. Scholars further worry that privately-run presidential museums risks turning them from objective sources of public history into personality-driven, partisan projects.
The Trump library foundation has pointed to the Obama center as a precedent for its preferred model, which is a privately run center that is more recreation hub than library. But while Mr. Obama’s presidential records are still accessible through the National Archives, Mr. Trump wants to keep the records, deciding for himself which to destroy or share with the public.
Trustees of the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit charity, include the president’s son Eric and a son-in-law, Michael Boulos. Like other presidential libraries, Mr. Trump’s would be paid for entirely by private individuals, corporations and organizations.
But unlike past presidents, whose library foundations raised most of the money for their libraries after they left office, Mr. Trump began fund-raising for the project days after his second inauguration. The first $63 million came as a total from four companies — ABC, Paramount, X and Meta — which had paid separate settlements in Mr. Trump’s lawsuits against them after he won a second term.
The Trump library will be built on what is now a parking lot for Miami Dade College. The 2.6-acre waterfront parcel, appraised at $67 million, was donated to the library by the state, at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
As an educational facility, the library would be exempted from about $1 million annually in state and local property taxes, according to a court filing, even though Mr. Trump has said the building could “most likely” house a hotel, sales of Trump-themed merchandise and other for-profit ventures.
An A.I.-assisted video rendering that Eric Trump released in March depicted potential exhibits including a golden escalator like the one Mr. Trump rode down to announce his candidacy in 2015 as well as a gilded statue of Mr. Trump raising a fist. The development could ostensibly also hold the $400 million Boeing 747 that Qatar is giving Mr. Trump as a replacement for the current Air Force One.
The foundation would “curate permanent and rotating exhibits” on Mr. Trump’s presidency, as well as lectures and student workshops, according to the foundation’s application to the Internal Revenue Service for tax exempt status. The application also says the library would hold his papers. There is no role for the National Archives, which gives Mr. Trump freedom to determine how the exhibits portray his presidency.
Lauren Harper of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, one of the groups suing the administration to preserve Mr. Trump’s papers for the public, called his proposed library “a shrine to the story that he wants to tell.”
“I’m just going to call it the Trump Miami tower because it’s not a library,” she said in an interview.
A Fight for Public Records
It was the National Archives’ demand for the records Mr. Trump took to Florida after his first term that led to his prosecution, making the agency an early target for retribution. Shortly after taking office the second time Mr. Trump fired the nation’s chief archivist, Colleen Shogan, and named Secretary of State Marco Rubio to lead the archives. In February, Mr. Rubio delegated control of the agency to his senior adviser, James Byron.
To lead the agency, Mr. Byron, 33, took a leave from his job as chief executive of the Nixon Foundation, some of whose past members were at the center of Nixon’s battle with the government over his records. The foundation and the archives, which maintains the Nixon library’s exhibits and records, have feuded for years over the library’s Watergate exhibit, which foundation board members viewed as overly critical of Nixon.
In May 2025, Mr. Byron emailed private presidential foundations, which are typically run by former presidents or their families and allies, for proposals on taking over more library and museum functions from the government, according to a copy of the email obtained by The New York Times. At least four presidential foundations — those of Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and John F. Kennedy — expressed interest in taking over the archives’ role in admission sales, events space management and educational programs, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Byron, who left the archives early last month, did not respond to requests for an interview. In an emailed statement he said he left because he had achieved his goal to “save many millions of dollars” for taxpayers by cutting costs and refocusing presidential library staff on archival work and building maintenance.
Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives, said that if Mr. Trump prevails in his efforts, he could try to block any future investigations involving subpoenas of his records by asserting personal property rights.
If he does so, Mr. Baron said, “there is no guarantee that those records will ever be made accessible to the public.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Elizabeth Williamson is a feature writer for The Times, based in Washington. She has been a journalist for three decades, on three continents.
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