The New Yorker – no paywall – “…”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.)..”

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…”