‘Vegas hotel meets aerospace bling’: Trump’s presidential library plan is a gaudy, self-glorifying monstrosity

‘Vegas hotel meets aerospace bling’: Trump’s presidential library plan is a gaudy, self-glorifying monstrosity From JFK’s modernist concrete to Obama’s ‘Tatooine sandcrawler’, the presidential library is where egos burnish their legacies. But the brash, bookless vibe of Trump’s, complete with giant golden statue, makes for the ugliest yet W ith 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 relationsh...