Don’t blink, kids, but I’m about to sound vaguely critical of Ronald Reagan.
If you’ve visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, you probably know that, by the standard of presidential libraries, it’s an awesome experience, with the highlight being the ability to walk through the Air Force One Boeing 707 aircraft SAM 27000, which served seven U.S. presidents from 1972 to 2001.
But the Reagan library, and particularly the Air Force One pavilion, which opened in 2005, accelerated the trend of turning presidential libraries — once primarily places to store papers for historians’ use — into increasingly large and flashy personal museums.
Before Herbert Hoover, presidential papers were stored at the Library of Congress or at universities and private repositories. But every president since Hoover has built or is planning a presidential library. Winston Churchill allegedly once said, “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” Every modern president has taken the opportunity to reframe recent history to conform to how they want to be remembered.
Financed through private donations, presidential libraries keep getting bigger, more expensive and more ostentatious, from Bill Clinton’s $165 million library in Little Rock to George W. Bush’s $500 million presidential center on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Now there’s the 19.3-acre, five-building Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, which has cost $615 million as of September and will perhaps reach $850 million once all is said and done. (You could buy more than 3,000 Lamborghini Uruses for that much money.)
Obama’s campus opens to the public June 19, and it’s getting a less-than-uniformly enthusiastic welcome, starting with the fact that the new museum building looks like a garrison built by the Galactic Empire from Star Wars. (“The Imperial Presidency,” indeed.)
The Obama Center also features Home Court, “a gymnasium including an NBA regulation-size court with intersecting practice courts”; a towering, 83-foot painted glass window, a fruit and vegetable garden, a wetland walk and a small branch of the Chicago Public Library.
Still, even all that looks modest compared with the announced plans for the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library in Miami. President Donald Trump intends to build a soaring skyscraper, perhaps symbolically dwarfing the next-door Freedom Tower, designated a National Historic Landmark for its role in hosting Cubans as they fled Fidel Castro’s takeover.
It was just about inevitable that the Trump presidential library would feature a colossal gold statue of Trump (1:09 in the announcement video) that the North Korean Kims or Turkmenistan’s former dictator, Saparmurad Niyazov, would envy. (Perhaps someone will add a giant golden calf alongside the president.) Trump won’t have just an Air Force One plane in the atrium like Reagan; he’ll have fighter jets, too. Look out, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum!
The Trump library also looks largely indistinguishable from other Trump properties that bear his name in huge letters. You can’t tell me the president hasn’t thought about tossing a few luxury condos in there. Maybe a casino? A rooftop pool with a water slide? There’s time to brainstorm some additions to really give it that signature Trump touch. (I initially wrote a joke that Trump might as well throw in a hotel, but … that’s apparently under consideration!)
It was a small step to go from repositories of documents to museums about the president, and no museum wants to say, “Eh, to be honest, our president was kind of a mixed bag.” Presidential libraries were almost destined to evolve into quasi-temples, dedicated to the insufficiently heralded greatness of their namesakes.
But there’s one glaring exception to this trend. As of last December, Joe Biden’s presidential library foundation expected to bring in just $11.3 million by the end of 2027, far less than the $200 million Biden’s aides say they eventually want to raise. A specific location for the building hasn’t been selected.
Biden fans may find this a disappointment, but perhaps the meager fundraising will result in a refreshingly modest and humble presidential library. We don’t really need another grandiose architectural monstrosity, with a Disneyland-like animatronic Biden declaring, “We finally beat Medicare.” Maybe it’s okay to have a presidential library that’s just an unassuming building with shelves full of official documents and some mementos and artifacts from the president’s term.
Inflation has been bad everywhere, including in monuments to egomania in our national leaders. Let’s halt this, lest the next president look at Dollywood in envy and plan the first combination Presidential Library and Amusement Park.
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