MuseumsPerspective
Trump wants a library. He must never have one.
By Philip KennicottArt and architecture criticJan. 28, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EST
Former president Donald Trump will have an official portrait in the National
Portrait Gallery at some point. And in states where he remains popular, he
could have airports, bridges and schools named for him. But Trump must never
have an official presidential library, and Congress should move quickly to make
sure he doesn’t.Things would seem to be moving toward establishing a Trump
library. On Jan. 20, the day he left office, the National Archives launched the
Donald J. Trump Presidential Library website. Already, there are rumors that
the former president is engaged with the idea of creating some kind of
presidential center, perhaps run by longtime aide Dan Scavino, with a price tag
as high as $2 billion. Even before Trump left office, a sophisticated parody
site, djtrumplibrary.com, began attracting admirers for its sharp architectural
and design satire on what has become the norm in presidential centers. But it
also deftly skewered the larger scam that has become attached to the
presidency: the use of presidential libraries and museums to entrench perpetual
fundraising and hagiography as a permanent part of every post-presidential
career.None of this, however, means that Trump could actually create a
presidential center similar to the one planned for former president Barack
Obama, or those dedicated to former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
As Anthony Clark, author of “The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History,
Run for Posterity & Enshrine Their Legacies,” wrote recently in Politico, it is
unlikely that Trump has the focus, administrative savvy and financial resources
to execute a presidential center: “Presidential libraries are complicated. And
if you understand how they work — and how Trump himself works — it’s nearly
impossible to imagine him actually pulling it off,” Clark writes.
But that doesn’t mean that Trump won’t try and that, in trying, cause further
damage to the country. That is why Congress should use this moment to
reconsider the legislation that helped create and shape the presidential
libraries now administered by the National Archives, not just to prevent Trump
from perpetrating one last, giant grift, but to reform the system so it serves
the country better. This is long overdue, and would need to be done even if
Trump weren’t trying to raise $2 billion for a Trump center. But his intention
to do so makes this urgent, even an issue of national security.
Before Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to donate his presidential papers to the
federal government in 1939, the documents and paperwork generated by a
president usually were considered the outgoing leader’s personal property.
Roosevelt recognized an interest in giving the public access to this material.
The 1955 Presidential Libraries Act formalized the process, encouraging
presidents to donate their papers, as well as land and a building to house
them, which the National Archives would officially maintain. Over the next
decades, these privately created, federally administered libraries became
increasingly complex, serving as museums, think tanks and shrines, with
presidents allowed considerable — often far too much — control over what
records were considered presidential and when the public could access
them.ndividual presidents used executive orders to make changes, the law was
amended and former presidents were required to donate more and more resources
to maintaining the federally operated part of these facilities. Finally, in
2017, faced with the possibility of having to donate 60 percent of the total
cost of an Obama presidential center to the federal government to cover running
the library part of the project, the 44th president opted out of the system
almost entirely. When the Obama center opens in Chicago, no official
presidential library will be part of the complex, which will be privately built
and operated. Obama’s presidential records, the vast bulk of them digital
rather than paper, will have to be accessed elsewhere, although the Archives
will loan material to the Obama center for exhibitions.Ordinarily, presidential
records can’t be accessed for five, and up to 12, years after a chief executive
leaves office. And before leaving office, a president has significant leverage
over what the public eventually can see, which documents are delivered to the
Archives, which are considered public and which are private, and to weigh in on
other matters, including security and the national interest.The case of Trump
is exceptional by any standard, and he should be afforded no discretion over
his records or any privilege to extend the amount of time before the public can
see them. Trump’s 2017 requirement that the National Archives withhold access
to his materials until 2033 should be abrogated, and Congress should begin an
extraordinary effort to recover as much of his communications legacy as
possible, even material that wasn’t deemed “presidential.” Trump’s presidency
mixed public and private interests in a way that was unprecedented in modern
American history, so his decisions on these matters can’t be trusted. He
incited an insurrection, and many of the people who may have participated in
that, including members of Congress, are still actively engaged in public life.
The need to know who they are and what they did isn’t just a matter for the
FBI, the Justice Department and prosecutors.As Clark points out, Congress has
intervened before in an exceptional presidential records case. A little more
than four months after Richard Nixon was forced from office in disgrace,
President Gerald Ford signed the Presidential Recordings and Materials
Preservation Act, which gave the government direct custody over Nixon’s records
to prevent their destruction. It wasn’t just that Congress didn’t trust Nixon,
it also felt “the need to provide the public with the full truth, at the
earliest reasonable date, of the abuses of governmental power popularly
identified under the generic term ‘Watergate,’ ” according to the law’s text.
It is imperative to the nation’s future that we know how and why
authoritarianism became so deeply and pervasively rooted in the Trump
administration. Historians, journalists and biographers need immediate access
to this material (with the minimal oversight necessary by professional,
nonpartisan archivists) to help educate the American public on the greatest
threat to the republic since the Civil War.
Nixon was interested, primarily, in keeping the full extent of his criminal and
disreputable behavior from becoming public, although he eventually did succeed
in creating a Nixon library. The danger of Trump using a presidential library
to burnish his image is far more serious, with the ex-president and his
surrogates still promoting the idea that his electoral loss was somehow
fraudulent. That creates an ongoing uncertainty in American public life, which
Trump and even more unscrupulous actors will use to further division, inflame
tension, exacerbate racism and delegitimize the American democratic system.
So even a privately funded and operated Trump presidential library, which would
be devoted to whitewashing his record and rewriting history, is a terrible and
even dangerous idea. Further, given Trump’s alleged misuse of charitable funds,
including self-dealing, waste and other illegal activities, at his now
dissolved New York-based foundation, any intention to start another public
entity can only be considered a crime scene waiting to happen.If it
unfortunately does happen, it probably will be in Florida, where state Attorney
General Ashley Moody is one of Trump’s top surrogates and a prominent supporter
of his false claims of election fraud. So, on this matter, Americans cannot
trust the rule of law in Florida, but they can put pressure on corporate and
other entities not to donate to any group associated with any effort to build a
Trump presidential center. And the FBI can keep a close watch on any national
group created to solicit funding for such an endeavor.
Finally, Congress can improve American record-keeping and preservation by
forbidding future presidents from raising money for presidential centers while
still in office. Access to presidential records is also expensive and time
consuming — even digital documents, the quantity of which has grown
exponentially since most communications became electronic, need to be sorted,
surveyed and labeled, a process that is laborious. Rachel Vagts, president of
the Society of American Archivists, points out that the most urgent need, right
now, is better funding for the National Archives, and a better culture of
compliance with laws governing record-keeping.Trump reportedly flouted those
laws on a regular basis, tearing up and discarding even paper documents. The
extent to which he and his administration destroyed records and communicated
outside of federal systems is unknown, which is why he and his people should be
cut out of the process of preserving those documents. And Americans should
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.
