Stacks of Cash | The New Yorker
Because I’m not cool, I like to visit presidential libraries. The first I went was Franklin D. Roosevelt, to Hyde Park, New York. (In an Instagram article, I described experience as “historiographically engaging”. I told you that I was cool.) I also visited the library of John F. Kennedy, in Boston, and Lyndon B. Johnson, in Austin, during which the most memorable exhibition was an animatronic-animatonia model of Johnson. (On Instagram, I described it as “disturbing”.) During a road trip in 2019, I forced a friend to send us through the Texas A. & M. campus so that we can visit the library of George HW Bush. The exhibitions included a condolence book for Barbara Bush, the president’s wife, in which Paul Ryan had misized the “condolences”.
During Donald Trump’s first term, I sometimes imagined what his library might look like, given his double love of insipid real estate projects and self-monumentalization. Apparently, I was not the only one: even before Trump took up his duties, Jeffrey Frank imagined a visit, in this magazine, with a ride on a replica of the famous Trump Tower escalator; Later, other journalists wondered if Trump’s library may not be more a theme park. When an eminent historian asked his Twitter subscribers to recommend possible locations, the responses included prison, North Korea and the total landscaping of four seasons. (I made a little bet with a friend that the library would be built in Mar-A-Lago; my friend postponed to Bedminster.) After Trump left his duties in 2021, the expected confirmation never came, apparently because he saw the work on a library as a concession that his political career was over. Since his return to the office this year, however, the plans have progressed, and even if I may not win my bet, I could get closer: Florida legislators have adopted a bill facilitating the construction of presidential libraries in the State by exempting them from local regulations, and a site of Florida Atlantic University, which is near Mar-AGO, seems to be. “There are a few truths that we consider obvious,” said one of the legislators who supported the bill. “` `Die hard ” is a Christmas film, almond and cashew milk is more precisely described as nut juice, and the library of President Trump should be located here in the state of Florida.”
Normally, such speeches and the media coverage that would result from it would be little more than a curiosity – an indulgence, even, at a moment of so many urgent news. And yet, the future library is already recurrent as a leitmotif in many of these stories. When Trump announced that his administration would accept a luxury jet of the Qatar government – an act widely criticized as cheeky corrupt – it was reported only after a period of service as Force One, she would finish in the library. Also go to the library: the colonies’ product that Trump has taken from the media and technological companies as a result of prosecution that many criticisms have characterized as flagrant shakedowns. Meta, X and ABC News have collectively promised up to forty-seven million dollars at the library, according to reports. In July, Paramount – the mother company of CBS, which, at the time, was looking for federal approval for a merger – added sixteen million dollars to this sum, less legal costs, after choosing to pay a ridiculous prosecution that Trump brought on the “60 minutes” made to an interview with Kamala Harris. (The merger was lit by green last week.) Jameel Jaffer, the chief of the Knight First Amendment Institute of the University of Columbia, said that the library “will be a permanent monument to the surrender of Paramount, a continuous recall of its inability to defend the freedoms which are essential to our democracy”.
This trend is disturbing, even more than an animatronic LBJ, it also looks like a betrayal of what I have always loved in presidential libraries: these are places where one can go to Nerd on Americaa, at a safe time distance of authoritarian trends threatening of modern politics. Again, it was probably always a naive view of such spaces; Many people, of course, lived the story inside. And, as is so often with Trump, the way he finances his library, although unique, shines a light from Klieg in a troubled area of the law which has long been quietly problematic. It is also a recall of the importance of the historical file and which can define it.
The idea of the presidential library dates back to the end of the nineteen years, when Roosevelt decided to give his papers to the federal government and move them to a flame retardant building near its family home. According to Anthony Clark, a former member of the Congress who wrote a book on presidential libraries, Roosevelt made room to display memories to the public “almost as a reflection afterwards”. Most of the presidential libraries would come house both the paper trace of a presidency, which the researchers consult, as well as a commemorative museum, which is the little that most tourists visit. Over time, these museums have become more ambitious and sometimes have proven to be of questionable historical value. The Richard Nixon museum initially presented Watergate as a coup and accused Woodward and Bernstein of corruption.
Roosevelt has no legal obligation to make his documents accessible to the public, but since 1978, thanks to Nixon and Watergate, the presidential files have been considered as federal goods and are supposed to be given to the National Archives and Records Administration. There has never been a government obligation to open an associated museum, but generally they were also managed by Nara. (Nixon was unusual in that he was directed in private for many years; in 2007, Nara I took it back and torn it and replaced the exposure of Watergate.) Before the government is involved on the museum side, the structures must be planned and built using external funds, by doing them, in practice, fuzzy mixtures of the public and the private sector. When the presidential libraries are given to the government, they must also put the endowments to help to defray future maintenance costs.
Barack Obama broke the mold: his presidential museum, in Chicago, which is in a way always Not open, is an entirely private company, led by a foundation; Its official files are being scanned and will continue to be supervised by Nara. After this effective divorce of library and museum functions was announced, Clark expressed his hope about the arrangement. “What was intended to be serious research centers have turned into flashy and partisans temples praising the story of Huckster,” he wrote in Politico. “Even if they are funded by taxpayers and controlled by a federal agency, the private foundations established by the former presidents to build the libraries retain an excessive influence.” The Obama model would at least prevent the government of hagiography affairs. However, not everyone was favorable. Timothy Naftali, who was responsible for revising the installation of Nixon as the first federal director and who is now a historian in Columbia, argued that the private nature of the Obama center is an obstacle to non -partisan public history. “This opens the door,” he said, “to a truly terrible Trump library.”
The threat that Trump represents the maintenance of a specific historical file should be obvious. During his first mandate, he was accused of shredding the documents and throwing them into the toilets; After leaving his duties, he was charged criminally for hoarding official files, some of which classified, in Mar-A-Lago, then obstructing government efforts to recover them. (At one point, Trump tried to claim that some of Mar-A-Lago’s documents were bound for his library; after the Capitol insurrection in 2021, Philip Kennicott, critic at Washington Jobargued that it was dangerous to allow Trump to have a presidential library. He called on the congress to intervene and “shame anyone – including architectural firms, exhibition designers and business donors – which helps Trump to perpetuate lies that almost destroyed our 2444 -year efforts to create a democratically governed republic.”
Even before the insurrection, some observers stressed that the Trump division could make it difficult for him to collect funds for his library with business donors. Now, of course, the problem is precisely the opposite – there is no shortage of rich interests seeking to pay loyalty to Trump, and his future library seems to be a particularly practical way for them to do so. Indeed, unlike other forms of political donation, anyone can give money to a library project of the president at any time, without any requirement for rigorous disclosure. After Qatar proposed to give Trump the luxury jet, criticisms suggested that the administration used the assertion that it ends in its library as an end of rules prohibiting foreign emoluments. According to ABC News, a legal analysis of Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, seemed to suggest so much. (Recently, ABC and Washington Job indicated that the agreement finalizing the transfer of the jet is not conditional on the destination of the library.)
Trump may like his library to have a large brilliant plane as a tourist attraction; Ronald Reagan’s library has one, which apparently inspired Trump. (It is somewhat ironic since the people involved in the Reagan library would have called Trump as “spoiled kid in a sandbox” and “Voldemort”.) But the corruption potential is obvious. Last month, Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senator, published a report on “Corruption in sight?”, Who said that the Trump library had hitherto received at least half a billion of gift dollars. In addition to the Qatari jet and Trump regulations with media companies, other cash flows intended for the library include the remains of inaugural funds and the product of private dinners; Companies that make collectibles, clothing and kitchen utensils have promised to donate goods. Warren and other Democratic legislators proposed a bill which, among other things, would prohibit presidents from raising funds for libraries when he was still in power, with a few limited exceptions; extend the two -year ban for donations made by foreign nationals, lobbyists, entrepreneurs and forgiveness seekers; and mandate, at least for a while, that donations of two hundred dollars or more are disclosed to NaraAnd the identities of the donors are made public. The legislators could theoretically go even further; Last week, Naftali, the historian, noted in an interview with “On the Media” of WNYC that “the best way to eliminate this corruption opportunity” would be that the congress finances the libraries in their entirety, although he added that this would not happen.
