Trump Reveals Glassy Skyscraper Design Of Miami Presidential Library
After months of tug of war over a 2.6-acre parcel in Downtown Miami gifted to President Donald Trump for his presidential library, Trump has released the first look at the project.
The renderings of the tower were released by the president and his son Eric Trump on their social media accounts Monday night. The 1-minute, 40-second clip showed a tall glass building with a red, white and blue spire with Trump emblazoned across the top of its facade.
The video also shows a rooftop patio, an auditorium, a ballroom similar to the one at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, a golden statue of Trump standing with a fist in the air, and the Air Force One jet the president received as a gift from the government of Qatar situated in a large atrium.
"Over the past six months, I have poured my heart and soul into this project with my incredible team at @Trump," Eric Trump wrote on his X account, announcing the renderings.
Coral Gables-based architecture and engineering firm Bermello Ajamil & Partners was tapped to design the project.
A website was also launched to solicit donations.
The foundation plans to raise $300M by this year toward construction of the library and double that by next year, the Miami Herald reported in November. There isn't a cost estimate available now that the true scope of the project has been made public.
The foundation plans to spend five years acquiring, designing, fundraising, building and cataloging artifacts for the library, according to tax-exempt status documents reviewed by the Herald in November.
Other plans, according to the documents, include a gift shop and a scholarship program for students looking to study history, political science, public service or library sciences.
The site, appraised at about $67M, sits directly next to the 14-story historic Freedom Tower, a Spanish revival building that served as a resource center for Cubans seeking asylum in the U.S. between 1962 and 1974.
The announcement comes just a few months after a legal battle almost halted the transfer of the land, which was serving as an employee parking lot for Miami Dade College’s Wolfson Campus.
The college’s board of trustees voted in September to hand the site over to the state, which had paved an easy path to land its first presidential library by ensuring counties and municipalities couldn’t block presidential libraries unless authorized by federal law.
Gov. Ron DeSantis already planned to gift the site to serve as Trump’s presidential library.
But the transfer was paused in October when a judge ruled the college's board of trustees didn’t provide a reasonable amount of public notice of the government meeting and placed a temporary block on the land transfer.
By November, the board was set to vote again, but it had more input from the public, the majority of whom were against the proposal.
According to a poll conducted by Bendixen & Amandi International, 74% of Miami voters, 59% of which were Republican, opposed the deal, The Wall Street Journal reported.
But by December, the board of trustees unanimously voted to hand over the site again.
In addition to the library itself, Trump is hoping to build a hotel on the site to accommodate tourists, the WSJ reported.
