Opinion: A Peek Inside What Trump’s Presidential Library May Look Like

As a real estate brand, the name Trump pairs nicely with almost any building. Consider, Trump Hotel. Trump Casino. Trump Golf Club.

Just look at the directory of Trump Tower and all these locations make sense.

But there’s one type of building that bumps up against the name: Trump Library. Libraries are places of learning—often free to the public—and that just doesn’t sound like Trump.

Still, fundraising for a Trump Presidential Library has officially kicked off with a reported donation of $15 million from ABC News. This largesse was part of a settlement from a defamation lawsuit that President-elect Donald Trump brought against George Stephanopoulos for calling him a—nope, not going there.

Now there was a time when super-wealthy men invested large sums of their own money in libraries. Industrialist Andrew Carnegie is credited with establishing the modern public library system. In less than 50 years, he and his foundation built 1,687 public libraries in the United States.

Financier John Pierpont (JP) Morgan Sr. was a great collector of books who kept a private librarian on his staff. After he died, his son (JP Jr.) opened up his father’s extraordinary collection to the public so everyone could regard his treasures, including letters from George Washington and a Gutenberg Bible.

Trump’s presidential library will presumably feature his own personally endorsed “God Bless the USA” bible, although anyone with sixty bucks can own one. Where Morgan spent over $200,000 in 1896 to purchase the Gutenberg, Trump has pocketed over $300,000 in royalties from hawking his. Clearly, Trump would rather sell a book than read one.

Today, the Morgan Library is divided into rooms that feature literary manuscripts, historical manuscripts, musical manuscripts, illuminated manuscripts, and incunables. Trump’s library would more likely divided into:

• Books by Me

• Books about Me (only the nice ones)

• Books by family members (but not read by Me including Melania’s recent New York Times best-seller which was mostly photos)

• Books by Fox News hosts with a special “JD Vance nook”

• Books by Jackie Collins (because that lady could write and her sister was hot)

Still, it’s fine that books aren’t Trump’s thing because most presidential libraries are less about books and more about storing archives and displaying gifts.

For example, the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas is home to “approximately 78 million pages of official records, 20 million emails, 2.6 million photographs, 12,400 videotapes, and over 5,900 audio recordings.”

The Clinton Library also includes over 100,000 objects and works of art that the family collected over their eight years in the White House.

But this could be problematic for Trump’s library, too. He doesn’t care much for research or archiving, famously eschewing email and potentially-incriminating paper trails.

In the first Trump administration, the White House stopped the practice of releasing visitor logs. His Secret Service wiped their phones after January 6 which deleted crucial texts.

Objects and works of art presented to the president technically belong to the American people. The website of the George W. Bush Library in Dallas features these bejeweled gold-plated silver stirrups which were gifted to President Bush by King Mohammed VI of Morocco in 2004.

It’s unlikely that Trump would simply hand over something so valuable to the public when he could regift them—perhaps as a baby present when daughter Tiffany Trump gives birth.

So what would Trump’s library look like? President Barack Obama’s Foundation hired renowned architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien to design his namesake presidential library in Chicago. I.M. Pei & Partners designed the majestic John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

Thanks to an early morning FBI raid in 2022, we have a sense of how Trump likes to store his documents.

With this as a template, the Trump Presidential Library might be envisioned as a 100,000 square foot tiled space divided into 500 bathrooms, each with a tub, a sink and a toilet. Boxes will be piled high to the ceiling. And instead of staring at boring manuscripts in display cases, the public will be invited to pull aside the shower curtains and sift through the presidential materials themselves.

Plowing through unmarked cartons, visitors might even have the exciting experience of stumbling over top secret Iran war plans. This sort of interactive experience sounds modern and allows young adults who enjoy RPGs to decide whether they want to take on the role of an FBI agent… a foreign spy… or co-conspirator #2.

And there could still be books. On the way to the gift shop, visitors might pass shelves filled with thick hardcover books by authors like Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. But when one of those books is opened—surprise!—it reveals the pages have been hollowed out. The books are actually safes and visitors will be encouraged to slip in some cash so they too can be part of Trump’s legacy.

Or perhaps Trump will skip the marbled temple of knowledge altogether. Instead, he could simply use the $15 million he received from ABC to purchase a kindle ($150) and $500 for 50 digital books and a portable toilet ($750) which he could stick on one of his golf courses.

Then the leftover $14,998,600 in funds could go straight to his “library advisory committee,” including wife Melania, son Barron, and a cruise ship full of lawyers.