The architect Cass Gilbert once said a skyscraper is a machine to make the land pay.
It’s hard to imagine a more finely tuned machine than the Trump Presidential Library, a glass-walled Miami tower whose video renderings were released by the president’s son Eric on Monday night. The project has a balance sheet that would make a developer blush. The land side of the ledger is already taken care of: Miami Dade College surreptitiously transferred the Biscayne Boulevard parcel to the state of Florida last year, which then donated it to the president’s library foundation, a giveaway of a waterfront site that one of the college’s former presidents recently called “unimaginable.”
The revenue is beginning to take shape as well. The library has already been used to justify the gift of a $400 million presidential jet from Qatar. It has served as the supposed destination for the $63 million in settlement funds (now mysteriously missing) that ABC, X, Meta, and Paramount forked over in response to President Trump’s lawsuits. The president said yesterday that the library will “most likely” feature a hotel and maybe some offices, making it an explicit business venture for the Trump family, one that erases any remaining putative distinction between the Trump presidency and the Trump business empire. Having maintained his businesses through his terms, Trump will now try to do the reverse, storing some of his presidential power in a commercial skyscraper that will outlast his second term.
The library looks to be about 50 stories tall—and it has to be big because it has to do the work that Mar-a-Lago cannot. It has to be big to upstage Barack Obama, whose own presidential center opens this summer in Chicago. But most of all, it has to be big because it’s a mausoleum for the emoluments clause and the long tradition of a profit-free presidency—big enough to contain dozens of floors of rentable space as well as that jumbo jet in its lobby, the bulbous nose practically bursting through the giant golden door.
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From a design perspective, the building is a retreat from the neoclassicism of the administration’s architectural executive orders, and a return to the modernist glass skyscrapers that defined the Trump aesthetic before he got into politics. The architect is Bermello Ajamil & Partners, a Miami-based firm that has designed a variety of hotels and public buildings—an unusually low-profile choice for such a high-profile building. But this president wasn’t going to end up with a piece of experimental architecture like the “Obamalisk” that his predecessor commissioned in Chicago. In the renderings, the Trump Library, with its polygonal summit, tapering sides, and giant rooftop spire, resembles nothing so much as Manhattan’s One World Trade Center, albeit with a dark Trump Tower window glaze—a New York transplant with sunglasses on.
As befits the presidential-library-as-business-venture, the project has been supervised by Eric Trump and his team at the Trump Organization, the president’s hospitality business. “Over the past six months, I have poured my heart and soul into this project,” Eric wrote on X on Monday night. It took six months for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to steer the downtown parking lot, acquired for Miami Dade College’s expansion and thought to be worth more than $100 million, into the hands of the president’s son for a sum of $10.
The library video released Monday night, however, seems to have taken more like six minutes, and bears all the hallmarks of AI-generated slop—including the feeling that it deserves your attention for no more than six seconds. The renderings misspell the words Presidential and Library, and imagine the slender tower sitting atop a colossal pedestal that somehow encompasses the aforementioned jumbo jet, a bunch of other planes, and a replica of Trump’s White House ballroom side by side. In reality, the 747 alone will barely fit on-site; the contractors will have to build around the wings like it’s Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel.
But let’s get to the typical function of a presidential library: the fastidious preservation and display of records for future generations of citizens and historians. That is apparently an afterthought here. No books, documents, exhibits, computers, or research facilities are visible in Trump’s Miami project; it makes the documents bathroom at Mar-a-Lago look like the Beinecke. Humans don’t do much in the video beyond gala-style schmoozing, a demonstration of the fundraising, gatekeeping, and influence-peddling that the building will surely enable. Its 50-odd stories must be intended to host more than just occasional events, however, a fact that Florida decision makers knew when they deeded the plot. “What we voted on today was to allow that library to be put there,” Wilton Simpson, Florida’s commissioner of agriculture, told the Miami Herald after the governor’s cabinet voted to hand over the land. “If there’s other amenities that go along with that, well, so be it.”
Hence, instead of exhibits or archives, we’ll get all the branding subtlety we have come to expect from the family that brought us Trump Steaks. The giant Trump letters facing the bay, as on the Trump Hotel in Chicago, will permanently label the Miami skyline. A giant golden statue of Trump, fist raised, will grace the auditorium stage. It’s a symbol of idol worship whose shock value will fade in due time, once the American public is accustomed to having a Donald J. Trump International Airport, Trump’s face on the country’s coins, and Trump’s signature on its bills. The closest thing to a piece of presidential history here is the golden escalator that runs down to the lobby, which is going to be a very popular photo op.
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For those curious for more information, don’t try the Trump Library website. There are only three buttons displayed: “Contact,” “Donate,” and another one to donate—this one for gifts of more than $10,000. Also available is a list of frequently asked questions, which features seven questions, all of which are about donations.
Many critics have long been concerned that presidential libraries operate as centers for political fundraising exempt from campaign-finance laws. Bill Clinton was criticized for secret and foreign donors to his presidential library and museum; George W. Bush was embarrassed when one of his bundlers was caught on video offering access to the administration in exchange for a library donation. Congress has tried for decades to close this loophole on presidential favor-trading.
This president hardly needs such a vessel at his disposal: He has pioneered new ways to enrich himself. His now-closed hotel in Washington, D.C., racked up giant bills from guests both foreign and domestic. His golf courses bill the Secret Service every time the president plays a round, and his private Florida club offers pay-to-play presidential access for members. He has made money from foreign-property licensing deals and from selling the Melania documentary to Amazon for the extraordinary price of $40 million (three times the next-highest offer). Most significant, his family has pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency sales, the money coming from buyers whom the public will likely never be able to identify.
The Trump Library will help ship some of that presidential power off to Florida whenever Trump leaves office. And if that power fades faster than expected? It’ll still be a Trump-run hotel-office project, funded by the president’s donors, on a $10 piece of waterfront land.
The post A Presidential Library Fit for a Real-Estate Mogul appeared first on The Atlantic.
