Housing Presidential History

Do you know what this is?

When I first saw this architectural rendering I had several guesses of what it could be.

• The proposed Mars space expedition vehicle assembly building

• The new Indonesian National Bank in Jakarta

• A new mosque proposed for Mecca in Saudi Arabia

I was wrong on all three counts.

This is the proposed Barack Obama Presidential Library in Chicago that is expected to cost $500 million to complete. That includes $175 million of estimated public funds for roadwork and infrastructure spending from the City of Chicago and state of Illinois.

In my last post I wrote about how profitable becoming President of the United States has become. It was not always this way. It might also not hold true for Donald Trump. Right now it looks like he will leave office poorer rather than richer.

In addition to the Presidency becoming a pathway to prosperity over the last 75 years, it also has become de rigueur to construct a library for the records and archives of each President. Most of the funding for these libraries are privately-funded by friendly donors of the President. There are no reporting requirements so there is no way of knowing what lies beneath the surface in this "generosity".

Up until this point, after construction is completed, the presidential library has been turned over to The National Archives and Records Administration which operates every facility for each President from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush. The Obama Library will not do that. It will be owned and operated by the private Obama Foundation.

The Obama Library will also be different in that it will not actually contain any Presidential papers, records, archives or artifacts. All of the records will be digitized by the NARA and will be accessed remotely to where the records are stored in remote NARA facilities.

I think this means that if you want to view the Obama birth certificate, his school records when he went to a Muslim elementary school in Indonesia, or his college records, you are out of luck.

Of course, that is nothing out of the ordinary. These libraries are, by their very nature, attempting to tilt history in favor of their guy. For the same reason, I doubt we will also see Trump's tax returns on display in his future library.

Anthony Clark in Politico notes some of the shortcomings of what the presidential library has developed into.

Presidential libraries are perfect examples of just how far presidents will go to control their own legacies. Since the first one was created in 1941, what were intended to be serious research centers have grown into flashy, partisan temples touting huckster history. Built with undisclosed, unlimited donations, often to sitting presidents, libraries have traditionally been donated to the government after their construction. But 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 libraries’ whitewashed exhibits are created by presidential boosters; they host political events; their boards are stacked with loyalists; and many of their important historical records may never see the light of day.

At the same time, Clark believes that the Obama Library may establish a better presidential library model for the future in limiting governmental involvement in operating the facility while permitting the NARA to focus solely on the archiving of records and determining the proper time period for their release to the public.

It will be interesting to see how all of it plays out in the end.

Of course, if I am a betting man, I would wait until Donald Trump starts to plan his Presidential Library to see something that might me truly unique and trend setting.

Who knows what lurks in that real estate mind of his?

Then again, Trump many not even need to build an edifice to showcase his more important Presidential records.

It may turn out that one will simply go to Twitter and view the archives of his tweets.

These are Trump's tweets over the last 24 hours.

The only other thing needed would be a glossary of the nicknames in which Trump uses with his tweets. Trump has proven to have an uncanny ability to zero in on his enemies' biggest weakness or insecurity about themselves and immortalize it for all to forever remember.

Who can forget these nicknames even if we might want to?

"Little Rocket Man"

"Crooked Hillary"

"Low Energy Jeb"

"Pocahontas"

"Little Marco"

"Cryin' Chuck Schumer"

I cannot count the number of times I talk to someone who says that they voted for Trump, they like what he is doing, but they wished he would stop using Twitter.

Would Trump be as effective in fighting against Fake News and the Deep State without Twitter?

I doubt it.

More importantly, I am sure there is absolutely no doubt in Trump's mind that he needs to be doing this to get his message out.

It has been said that "nice guys finish last."

I don't know if that is true. However, of those that Trump has graced with a nickname on Twitter, not many have outlasted Trump.