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5 hours ago
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With the unveiling of the prospective Trump presidential library, which, in its timing and substance looked for all the world like an April fool, the old adage that you can’t gild a turd but you can roll it in glitter has become bleakly redundant. It turns out that you can most definitely gild a turd.
At the heart of the proposed 47-storey skyscraper on Miami’s waterfront – 47 floors for the 47th President – is a giant golden statue of Trump giving off dictator-for-life vibes, his gilded fist triumphantly raised. Such an aureate monstrosity would not look out of place in Pyongyang or Ashgabat, though Turkmenistan’s former president Saparmurat Niyazov – another despot with a suspiciously luxuriant coiffure – went one better and had his $12m gold statue installed on a rotating pedestal so it would always face the sun.
The unveiling coincided with Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis renaming Palm Beach international airport, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago bolt-hole, as the President Donald J Trump international airport. After a sticky month in the Strait of Hormuz and the recent No Kings protests, not to mention plummeting approval ratings, Trump clearly felt the need for some self-glorifying pushback.
“This landmark will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest president our nation has ever known,” Eric Trump, the president’s son and the co-chair of the non-profit foundation seeking donations to build the library, gushed on social media.
“I don’t believe in building libraries or museums,” Donald Trump told reporters. “It’s going to be most likely a hotel.” Given that Trump’s relationship with architecture was shaped by his career as an “amazing” developer, this tilt is hardly surprising. Eric Trump’s video rendering of the “library” on social media showed a mirrored glass prosthesis with “TRUMP” emblazoned on it, populated by an AI-generated scrum of gussied-up Maga cocktail quaffers wafting around roof gardens and perusing a replica of the Trumpian Oval Office.
Resembling a Vegas hotel themed as a bling aerospace museum, a soaring lobby features gold escalators, jet fighters and the Qatari-donated “flying palace” of Air Force One, like a preposterous ship-in-a-bottle. Books are nowhere to be seen. It’s basically Trump in architectural form: the deal-doing warrior and man with the Midas touch, presided over by his gleaming, gloating, engorged effigy.
Designed by the Miami-based firm Bermello Ajamil, which specialises in luxury condominiums, the building appears loosely modelled on New York’s post-9/11 Freedom Tower. Yet already there are whiffs of shenanigans. The tract of waterfront land on which it will sit was gifted to Trump’s library foundation by Miami Dade College in a controversial transfer last year. A judge dismissed a complaint challenging the gift on the basis that the college’s board didn’t give sufficient notice for public discussion of the transfer. The site is valued at more than $67m.
“It’s not really a presidential library,” argued Thomas Kennedy, former political director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition on X. “It’s a real estate hustle, with land gifted at taxpayer expense, so they can build a hotel complex.”
Inaugurated by Franklin D Roosevelt, who recognised the importance of passing on papers and memorabilia from his administration to the nation, the presidential library is a uniquely American conceit. Suffused with the warm glow of philanthropy, it is a chance to set-dress your reputation and how you want history to judge you once you’ve finally exited the Oval Office.
Constituting an awkward hybrid of archive, museum and theme park, the presidential library is a kind of living mausoleum (and sometimes an actual mausoleum) dedicated to a single political personage. Private funding must be sought for construction, but once built, they are maintained by the federal government. From relatively modest beginnings – Roosevelt’s is a faux Dutch colonial manor house complete with a “New Deal” gift shop – they have burgeoned in scale and ambition, but invariably include a period replica of the Oval Office.
Architectural tastes vary considerably. Jackie Kennedy commissioned the Chinese-American architect IM Pei, who famously designed the pyramid at the Louvre, to devise a conspicuously modernist confection of concrete and smoked glass to house the JFK library, while Ronald Reagan favoured Spanish Mission style, with a slab of the Berlin Wall in the library grounds. Among the artefacts in George W Bush’s sprawling complex of ponderous pastiche classicism is Saddam Hussein’s pistol, seized during his capture in 2003. Doubtless Trump will be mulling over which spoils of war he might want to preserve for posterity.
As powerful men compete for their legacies, a degree of rivalry is inevitable, but given Trump’s sociopathic narcissism, the idea that he might be outshone by his predecessors is insupportable. It’s probably no coincidence that his Miami unveiling came in the same month as confirmation of the formal opening in June – specifically Juneteenth, the public holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the US – of Barack Obama’s presidential library, designed by the New York-based partnership of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Social media has witnessed a vituperative “battle of the styles”, with Obama’s library described as a “Marxist Tatooine sand crawler abomination”.
Set in Chicago’s languishing South Side, the $850m Obama Presidential Center has not been without its problems of its own. Escalating budgets and appropriation of public parkland have taken the gloss off the project, as have accusations that far from being a regenerative catalyst for an economically depressed area, it will merely impel gentrification and displace long time South Side residents.
In other news, Trump’s pet project of building a White House ballroom-cum-bunker on the ruins of the demolished East Wing has come to a shuddering stop for now, after a federal judge halted construction because congressional approval for the redevelopment had not been granted. Trump claimed the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s lawsuit holding his scheme to account was unwarranted, ranting against a “radical left group of lunatics”. But US district judge Richard Leon affirmed that “the president of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of first families. He is not, however, the owner.” Two days later, Washington’s planning authorities gave the go-ahead, and the justice department has appealed the judge’s ruling.
But if bullying and browbeating don’t work, Trump has a backup plan: an exact replica of the ballroom is destined to feature in his library tower, amplifying the nightmarish sense of fantasy that has come to balefully characterise every aspect of his presidency. The turd gilding is set to continue.
