Is the US ready for a presidential library with a gift shop bigger than its reading room?
During his second term as US president, Barack Obama joked about the location of his future presidential library. “Some have suggested that we put it in my birthplace but I would rather keep it in the United States,” he said.
This gag was at the expense of his eventual successor, Donald Trump, who had done more than anyone else to propagate the fantasy that Obama had been born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to hold the office of US president. The Obama Presidential Center is now under construction in Chicago. Trump has already proclaimed it as a “disaster”, apparently because of the overhiring of “woke” people and the engagement of insufficient numbers of the “good, hard, tough, mean construction workers that I love” (the Village People thing runs deep).
Trump might believe that it is a bit early to start contemplating his own presidential library. He is only six months into his second term and has yet to rule out seeking a third, whatever the objections of the pettifogging naysayer that is the Constitution of the United States. However, a placeholder website exists (trumplibrary.gov). He also has money to spend, in the form of settlements that he has won against media organisations that have connived to prevent his fellow citizens from fully appreciating the majesty of his rule. There’s Meta, which kicked him off Facebook and Instagram in 2021 for the trifling infraction of attempting to overthrow the constitutional order by force ($25m [€21.5m]); ABC, one of whose presenters outrageously suggested that Trump had committed a sexual assault worse than a court decided that he actually had ($15m [€12.9m]); and Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, whose show 60 Minutes had committed the unpardonable affront of editing an interview with former vice-president Kamala Harris ($16m [€13.8m], a meagre fraction of the not remotely insane $20bn [€17.2bn] that Trump was demanding).
Under the terms of the settlements, these monies are to be allocated towards the future Trump library. But what will it look like? Reports suggest that a couple of university campuses in Florida have been scouted as potential locations. Hints have also been dropped as to what one of the star attractions will be: the generous and pure-hearted present of the customised Boeing 747 that Trump accepted from Qatar. This is in spite of the purse-lipped resentment of those who grumbled that it was a flagrant bribe, as though Donald Trump of all people could ever be susceptible to such tawdry blandishments.
But there is no shortage of other possible exhibits. The classified files that Trump diligently lifted from the White House at the end of his first term for safekeeping in the bathrooms of Mar-a-Lago. The portraits of himself paid for with funds from the Trump Foundation – funds that might otherwise have been squandered on frivolous charitable enterprises. The dozens of expensive gifts from foreign governments that House Democrats allege have never been declared to the State Department as per the footling requirements of the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act but have been judiciously stored so that they can one day be selflessly shared with the American people.
With the project helmed by Eric Trump and Michael Boulos (Tiffany Trump’s husband), it is very difficult to imagine that the current president’s library, when it opens, will be anything other than a tacky, gaudy folly attached to a gift shop stacked with sweatshop tchotchkes. It might even become the first US presidential library to end up declaring bankruptcy.
Mueller is a contributing editor at Monocle and the host of Monocle Radio’s ‘The Foreign Desk’. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
