Because I am uncool, I enjoy visiting Presidential libraries. The first one I went to was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, in Hyde Park, New York. (In an Instagram post, I described the experience as “historiographically engaging.” Told you I was uncool.) I’ve also visited John F. Kennedy’s library, in Boston, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s, in Austin, at which the most memorable exhibit was a life-size animatronic model of Johnson. (On Instagram, I described it as “unsettling.”) During a road trip in 2019, I forced a friend to route us through the campus of Texas A. & M. so we could visit George H. W. Bush’s library. The exhibits included a condolence book for Barbara Bush, the President’s wife, in which Paul Ryan had spelled “condolences” wrong.

During Donald Trump’s first term, I sometimes imagined what his library might look like, given his dual love of tasteless real-estate projects and self-monumentalization. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one: even before Trump took office, Jeffrey Frank pictured a visit, in this magazine, complete with a ride on a replica of the famous Trump Tower escalator; later, other journalists wondered if Trump’s library might not be more of a theme park. When a prominent historian asked his Twitter followers to recommend possible locations, the replies included prison, North Korea, and Four Seasons Total Landscaping. (I made a small wager with a friend that the library would be built at Mar-a-Lago; my friend plumped for Bedminster.) After Trump left office, in 2021, the anticipated confirmation never came, apparently because he viewed starting work on a library as a concession that his political career was over. Since his return to office this year, however, plans have moved forward, and while I may not win my wager, I might get close: Florida lawmakers passed a bill making it easier for Presidential libraries to be built in the state by exempting them from local regulations, and a site at Florida Atlantic University, which is near Mar-a-Lago, currently seems favored. “There are a few truths we hold to be self-evident,” one of the lawmakers who supported the bill said. “ ‘Die Hard’ is a Christmas movie, almond and cashew milk is more accurately described as nut juice, and President Trump’s library should be located here in the state of Florida.”

Normally, such talk and the attendant media coverage would be little more than a curiosity—an indulgence, even, at a moment of so many urgent news stories. And yet the future library is already recurring as a leitmotif in many of those stories. When Trump announced that his Administration would accept a luxury jet from the government of Qatar—an act widely decried as brazenly corrupt—it was reported that, after a period in service as Air Force One, it would end up in the library. Also going to the library: the proceeds of settlements that Trump has wrung out of media and tech companies following lawsuits that many critics have characterized as blatant shakedowns. Meta, X, and ABC News collectively pledged up to forty-seven million dollars to the library, according to reports. In July, Paramount—the parent company of CBS, which, at the time, was seeking federal approval for a merger—added sixteen million dollars to that sum, minus legal fees, after opting to settle a ludicrous suit that Trump brought over edits that “60 Minutes” made to an interview with Kamala Harris. (The merger was green-lighted last week.) Jameel Jaffer, the head of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said that the library “will be a permanent monument to Paramount’s surrender, a continual reminder of its failure to defend freedoms that are essential to our democracy.”

This trend is unsettling—even more so than an animatronic L.B.J. It also feels like a betrayal of what I’ve always liked about Presidential libraries: they are places where one can go to nerd out over Americana, at a safe temporal distance from the menacing authoritarian trends of modern politics. Then again, this was probably always a naïve view of such spaces; many people, of course, lived the history inside. And, as is so often the case with Trump, the way he is funding his library, while uniquely brazen, is shining a klieg light on a murky area of the law that has long been quietly problematic. He is also a walking reminder of the importance of the historical record, and who gets to set it.

The idea of the Presidential library dates to the late nineteen-thirties, when Roosevelt decided to donate his papers to the federal government and move them to a fireproof building near his family home. According to Anthony Clark, a former congressional staffer who has written a book about Presidential libraries, Roosevelt made room to display memorabilia to the public “almost as an afterthought.” Most Presidential libraries would come to house both the paper trail of a Presidency, for researchers to consult, and also a commemorative museum, which is the bit that most tourists actually visit. Over time, these museums grew more ambitious, and sometimes proved to be of questionable historical value. Richard Nixon’s museum initially presented Watergate as a coup, and accused Woodward and Bernstein of bribery.

Roosevelt was under no legal obligation to make his papers publicly available—but since 1978, thanks to Nixon and Watergate, Presidential records have been considered federal property, and are supposed to be handed over to the National Archives and Records Administration. There has never been a governmental requirement to open an associated museum, but typically these have also been managed by NARA. (Nixon’s was unusual in that it was run privately for many years; in 2007, NARA took it over and ripped out and replaced the Watergate exhibit.) Before the government gets involved on the museum side, however, the structures must be planned and built using outside funds, making them, in practice, fuzzy mixes of the public and the private. When Presidential libraries are donated to the government, they must also hand over endowments to help defray future maintenance costs.

Barack Obama broke the mold: his Presidential museum, in Chicago, which somehow is still not open, is an entirely private endeavor, run by a foundation; his official records are being digitized and will continue to be supervised by NARA. After this effective divorce of library and museum functions was announced, Clark expressed hope about the arrangement. “What were intended to be serious research centers have grown into flashy, partisan temples touting huckster history,” he wrote, in Politico. “Even though they are taxpayer-funded and controlled by a federal agency, the private foundations established by former presidents to build the libraries retain outsize influence.” The Obama model would at least keep the government out of the business of hagiography. Not everyone was supportive, however. Timothy Naftali, who was responsible for overhauling the Nixon facility as its first federal director and who is now a historian at Columbia, has argued that the private nature of Obama’s center is an impediment to nonpartisan public history. “It opens the door,” he said, “to a truly terrible Trump library.”

The threat that Trump poses to the maintenance of an accurate historical record should be obvious by now. During his first term, he was accused of shredding documents and flushing them down the toilet; after leaving office, he was criminally indicted for hoarding official files, some of them classified, at Mar-a-Lago, and then obstructing government efforts to get them back. (At one point, Trump tried to claim that some of the documents at Mar-a-Lago were bound for his library; perhaps, in a narrow sense, I did win my wager after all.) And it’s reasonable to fear that a Trump museum would become a monument to conspiracy theories. Following the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021, Philip Kennicott, a critic at the Washington Post, argued that it was dangerous to allow Trump to have a Presidential library at all. He called on Congress to step in, and on Americans to “shame anyone—including architecture firms, exhibit designers and corporate donors—who helps Trump perpetuate the lies that nearly destroyed our 244-year-old effort to create a democratically governed republic.”

Even before the insurrection, some observers pointed out that Trump’s divisiveness might make it hard for him to raise money for his library from corporate donors. Now, of course, the problem is precisely the opposite—there is no shortage of wealthy interests seeking to pay fealty to Trump, and his future library appears to be a particularly convenient way for them to do so. This is because, unlike other forms of political donation, anyone can give money to a President’s library project at any time, without any rigorous disclosure requirements. After Qatar proposed to give Trump the luxury jet, critics suggested that the Administration was using the claim that it would wind up in his library as an end run around rules prohibiting foreign emoluments. According to ABC News, a legal analysis by Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, seemed to suggest as much. (Recently, ABC and the Washington Post reported that the deal finalizing the transfer of the jet is not conditional on the library destination.)

It’s possible that Trump would like his library to have a big shiny plane as a tourist attraction; Ronald Reagan’s library has one, which apparently inspired Trump. (This is somewhat ironic given that people involved with the Reagan library have reportedly referred to Trump as “a spoiled brat in a sandbox” and “Voldemort.”) But the potential for corruption is obvious. Last month, Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator, published a report headlined “Bribery in plain sight?,” which claimed that Trump’s library has so far received at least half a billion dollars in gifts. In addition to the Qatari jet and Trump’s settlements with media companies, other cash streams earmarked for the library reportedly include leftover inaugural funds and the proceeds from private dinners; companies that make collectibles, clothes, and cookware have promised to donate merchandise sales. Warren and other Democratic lawmakers proposed a bill that would, among other things, ban Presidents from fund-raising for libraries while still in office, with some limited exceptions; extend the ban by two years for donations made by foreign nationals, lobbyists, contractors, and pardon-seekers; and mandate, at least for a time, that donations of two hundred dollars or more be disclosed to NARA, and the donors’ identities be made public. Lawmakers could theoretically go even further; last week, Naftali, the historian, noted in an interview with WNYC’s “On the Media” that “the best way to eliminate this opportunity for corruption” would be for Congress to fund libraries in their entirety, though he added that it wasn’t likely to happen.