There is a certain kind of man who, upon being told that people are marching in the streets with signs reading “No Kings,” responds by announcing plans to build a glittering glass skyscraper-palace, complete with golden idols of himself. Civilization may yet survive, but irony clearly has not.
That man is, of course, President Donald Trump, who rolled out AI-generated renderings for his future presidential library by way of Truth Social. The library, if that word retains any meaning, will be a roughly fifty-story tower rising over downtown Miami, specifically over a nearly three-acre plot of land that Miami Dade College gifted to the Trump Foundation, in a shady backroom deal, valued at more than $67 million.
It’s essentially another Trump Tower that’s been given a MAGA makeover, with the word TRUMP glowing near the top and a red-white-and-blue spire jabbing at the clouds (though, no doubt a red baseball cap on top was considered). The ninety-second AI video rendering includes a replica Oval Office in its current garish splendor, a posh ballroom, rooftop gardens, and the luxury jet gifted by Qatar. There is also, naturally, a golden escalator deliberately evoking the one Trump descended at Trump Tower, New York, in 2015 to announce his first presidential campaign.
What it does not yet appear to have? A construction start date, an end date, or much of the humble archival seriousness one normally associates with a project like this. A presidential library is supposed to conjure images of the boring essential paperwork of governance: papers, records, memos, cables, meeting notes, the bureaucratic detritus of actual decision-making. Trump’s, by contrast, will contain a golden statue, a golden escalator, some jets, and replicas of places Trump likes.
The word “library” is doing an extraordinary amount of work in that title, though in fairness, a man whose literary canon consists of Sun Tzu and his own ghostwritten memoirs was never going to build the…
Auteur: Ryan Zickgraf
