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Trump releases first renderings of massive Miami highrise presidential library

Douglas Hanks and Claire Heddles, Miami Herald on

Published in News & Features

President Donald Trump’s foundation released a teaser video for his proposed presidential library in downtown Miami Monday, revealing plans for a skyscraper with a fully capitalized TRUMP emblazoned atop, a presidential jet in the lobby, an amphitheater where audiences will face a golden statue of the president and replicas of the White House, including the Rose Garden and a ballroom he’s building where the East Wing once stood.

The planned tower dwarfs all the surrounding Miami buildings in the rendering. The adjacent Freedom Tower — the former refugee center for Cuban asylum seekers and now a museum — appears about a quarter of the size of the Trump monument.

“Miami deserves this building,” Eric Trump, the Trump son who pushed for Florida to give his father’s foundation the land and is helping design the building, said in a statement to the Miami Herald on Monday. “It will be a masterpiece, the likes of which have never been seen in Florida or really anywhere.”

The project was designed by Bermello Ajamil, according to the video released on the Trump Library Foundation’s website. The firm also designed the downtown Miami Four Seasons hotel and tower and PortMiami cruise terminal.

The new Miami Trump legacy project teaser release comes just hours after Trump revealed new plans for his planned White House ballroom — which Democrats chastised him for as the U.S. war with Iran escalates and gas prices hit four-year highs.

Highlights from the 100-second video posted on social media include:

•The name “TRUMP,” the signature logo atop the president’s real estate developments, also sits near the top of the library tower.

•Trump plans a tower as tall or nearly as tall as anything around it in downtown Miami, overlooking Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. He has not said what will occupy the upper floors. In a text message Monday night, Eric Trump said people wouldn’t be living there. “No residential,” he said.

•A replica of Air Force One, the presidential plane is the showcase piece of the lobby off of Biscayne Boulevard. The government of Qatar is donating to the United States a jet to be used as Air Force One, reportedly with permission for Trump to use the plane once he leaves the White House.

•A golden statue of Trump with his fist raised stands on the stage of an auditorium inside the building. The video also has a hint of a Trump statue outside overlooking Biscayne Boulevard. A brief glimpse of the tower’s front entrance also shows the bottom half of a golden statue, with only the legs and shoes visible. Trump’s image will be a feature of the exterior of the building, with jumbo video screens showing his face in the footage.

 

•The Freedom Tower will be dwarfed by the library tower, which would go up on a parking lot that Gov. Ron DeSantis arranged for its owner, the state-run Miami Dade College, to give away for free for the library.

•Trump’s library will have a ballroom that appears to match renderings of the ballroom Trump is planning for the White House, on land where the east wing of the White House stood before the president had it demolished. The Miami tower also features a replica Oval Office and a replica Rose Garden. That appears to include reproductions of at least some of the portraits of former presidents that Trump installed around the garden. While the footage shows the mini portraits and plaques under them, it does not show whether that will include the derogatory comments Trump used for some of predecessors – including representing former President Joe Biden with only an autopen.

•A red-white-and-blue spire juts out skyward from the top of the building, above Trump’s name. The video also shows a massive American flag hanging down from the center of the tower.

•Next to Air Force One, a pair of escalators feature prominently in the video of a library for a president who launched his 2016 campaign by descending an escalator in his Trump Tower building in New York.

It’s not immediately clear if the vision in the teaser is possible within the 2.6-acre lot the nonprofit foundation was given at no cost by Miami Dade College and Florida officials.

The college initially transferred the land to the state for the project during a brief public meeting with no discussion or debate about its planned use. After a lawsuit accused the college’s board of trustees of violating Florida’s public transparency laws, the school took a new vote in December — clearing the way for the state to transfer the land.

Trump’s library foundation was granted nonprofit status during an extraordinarily quick approval process by the IRS. Much of the public funds the foundation has raised thus far have been through high-profile settlements with media companies after Trump sued them.

The foundation is planning to raise nearly $1 billion dollars over the next three years, while Trump is still in office, tax filings show. Presidential libraries are one of the few ways sitting presidents can solicit foreign donations — without ever having to disclose their donors.


©2026 Miami Herald. Visit at miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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