So many were in denial up to now. It’s time to anticipate the site for the Trump Presidential Library … will it be Mar-a-Lago, Las Vegas, Queens, Long Island, maybe in Scotland or Russia … just make sure there are no wind turbines nearby.
Claes Oldenberg, Proposed Colossal Monument for Staten Island, N.Y.C. – Fan (1965)
It is telling that there are more pre-Inaugural articles speculating on the Trumpian archives than any previous POTUS. Since Trump is not bookish, it’s less a library than a magazine rack with a WiFi connection.
Regardless of the LIbrary’s location, bets are that he sites his tomb on the South Lawn, where the Easter eggs collect, or like Lord Nelson (ha-ha) at St Paul’s Cathedral, in the White House basement.
The Trump Presidential Library and Casino looks like it did the day he opened it, unusually early in March 2017. There are faux ionic columns, a huge gold spray-paint 1980s-font title above the door, and an attached Presidential Golf Course out back. And portraits. Dozens. It’s almost North Korean in its obsession with portraits of our soon to be history dear leader….Next door is the adjoining Casino part of the complex which is still open to the public. Breitbart-Fox plays on the TVs, there are lots of slots, and (I note only white dealers for) card games. The slots are bizarre because if you win a jackpot pennies spill out to the tune of Hail to the Chief and the President’s voice shouting in that droning yell; “WINNER!” But nobody wins. democracychronicles.com/…
Couldn’t be near or on a public university, so which private educational institution could get the “honor” … Wharton? His Orangeness needs to be identified with NYC, so Fordham, … or something on Long Island … Hofstra? Or maybe Rockefeller U., Yeshiva …
Governor’s Island could do it, with some multi-story eyesore, but it might not have room for the destination resort and hospitality shrine. Atlantic City would be too obvious and there’s not enough widows to hassle with eminent domain …
Seventy-some years later, if the nation (and world) is lucky, the first scholars to settle in at the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library may find themselves starting their formidable research task by asking, “How the hell did we survive this?”
Who is buried in Trump’s Tomb … many Benjamins
When the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum opens its doors, historians may get a more rounded view of the reality-show star and businessman who has just been elected President of the United States. After a passage that might include a ride on a replica of the Trump Tower escalator, and possibly a chance to contemplate the six-foot-tall portrait of Trump for which a Trump charity paid twenty thousand dollars, researchers in the archives may be able to study notes from conversations, minutes of meetings, and memorandums to staff, friends, and family. The advent of e-mail has made the project of a Presidential library more of a challenge, and the effect of the Twitter era is unknown, but there will always be a human factor, and telling personal glimpses.
A presidential library, however, is not just about sharing with the public such artifacts as the presidential tanning bed.
Scholars beginning in 2040, when access is opened, will enjoy perusing the six filing cabinets containing White House records from the tumultuous years of 2017-2020. They can sort for clues to what went wrong in those e-mails that Mr. Trump and his staff did not delete as they prepared to turn over the West Wing to President Tim Kaine.
As you know, most American presidential libraries are administered by the National Archives. Because of President Trump’s expressed wishes and also the institution’s unique private funding, which he has promised to reveal at a future date, this one runs differently: The museum side is controlled by independent curators, while the archives remain under a two-decade seal “for the protection of the innocent,” Library CEO Tiffany Trump has explained.
We hope you enjoy your visit. Before you leave us today, please be sure to take a moment to reflect on a presidential tweet from January, 2021. It is mounted in gilt-edged letters in the library’s entrance hall, and it sums up the unique tone and spirit of this man and his presidency:
“I may not be a two-term president, but business is booming. And you will always have to call me ‘President Trump.’ Get used to it, elites!”
So the two guys who gave us “Game Change” the movie, book, dessert topping and floorwax, are now simply “jocular” as their program “With All Due Respect” bit the dust.
As blocked as Mark McKinnon’s LBJ hat, Halperin & Heilemann reached the end of their professional journalism careers to become Beltway game show hosts in their Showtime series “The Circus”.
We now see on the eve of Orange Gasbag’s regime, these Siamese twins playing the role of Steve Wilkos in a bad political imitation of the Jerry Springer show.
Their future as whipping boys for Amber Wighat will come with whatever hagiography emerges soon.
On the other hand we get something we sometimes get with Anthony Bourdain, snarkiness over expensive dinners. Only in the case of HalHeiny, they give us the usual Beltway cynicism derived from enabling the kleptocracy’s ideology du jour, which in this cycle it’s that Dixiecrat revisionism that keeps the less polite terms for ethno-nationalism still in power. Do HalHeiny ever talk to POC, then again privilege must have its voice.
“The Circus reveals a more human side of the candidates and paints a clear picture of how grueling life can be on the campaign trail, yet the show fails to provide the type of candid analysis and discourse it alludes to during this incredibly unique and cantankerous election cycle.”[4]
Definitely not “Woodstein” as in Woodward & Bernstein. But Mike Bloomberg’s malapropism does give us a peek at how they’re the Bunga-Bunga boys for POTUS-45.
At a town hall on Thursday at Bloomberg LP’s Washington bureau, according to several sources with knowledge of the meeting, the former New York mayor said he refers to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, who host “With All Due Respect” on Bloomberg TV, as “Haldeman and Ehrlichman.” (Bloomberg has since apologized for his remarks. See update below.)
That’s a reference to two of Richard Nixon’s most notorious deputies who eventually went to jail over the Watergate scandal…
In a memo to staff Bloomberg Politics staff, Bloomberg apologized for making the Haldeman/Ehrlichman reference, saying it was a “jocular comparison” that was not meant to be disparaging.
Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment. ___________________________________________________________
My husband played tuba in his high school orchestra and marching band, using an instrument loaned to him by the school. Aside from being bulky and expensive, the tuba does not lend itself to urban living, so he never owned one of his own, and hadn’t played in years by the time we met. But a few years after we got married, he heard about the Early Music Society of Los Angeles, and found one of its leaders who gave lessons in her home, which was not very far from where we were living at the time.
So he took up recorder and transverse flute. Other members of the society played some of the more exotic period instruments, like the shawm, the sackbut, the krumhorn and the rackett.
Lacking any precedent for appreciating intelligence and relying on negotiating based on posture and force, Trump will for the US be an even greater counter-terror disaster than previous GOP administrations. We will count ourselves lucky to have a Panama-like incursion but have the potential for the first historical use of theater tactical nuclear weapons.
Because of the potential for lack of attention and seconding of military analysis to more extreme ex-military advisors, Trump’s fitness or lack of it as evidenced so far will make the next four years more problematic. Think of the state of GW Bush national intelligence in August 2001 and then the invisible WMDs in Iraq.
the US was unpresidented (sic) in an unprecedented vote
Trump’s preferred cinematic depictions of Patton-MacArthur rather than the reality of Eisenhower-Bradley will signal a lack rather than excess of strength to cooperating intelligence partners. An intentional reluctance to be briefed coupled with a desire to act with any sense of deliberation has already given enemies foreign or domestic some confidence that there could be a greater range of indecisiveness and deliberation in counter-terrorism planning and response from the Trump administration.
only the Electoral College can autocorrect this mistake
In technical terms Trump’s ex-post regret for any attack will actually encourage greater frequency of attacks in terms of supply side effects for the MIC, and will ironically reward greater procurement and increase deficits while benefiting the 1%.
The Russian attack on the US election and Trump’s real or imagined complicity make the likelihood greater for repeated conflict. That there is now a tacking to confront China and being manipulated by Taiwan not only agitates the one-China position, but while benefiting US oligarchs, will also encourage the kinds of trade war skirmishes that will destabilize the international economy.
(2015) 
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