What Matters: The President might want Trump World, but he needs a

We don’t know the answers to those questions yet. But one thing we know is that presidential libraries are not, under law, taxpayer-funded parting gifts for presidential egos, but rather repositories for their records, which must be conceived and built with private funds. Another is that Trump is heading to Florida to begin his post-presidential life, hoping to raise $2 billion, according to The Washington Post, while the country comes to terms with how to remember and learn from his divisive presidency.

“A former president can open a shrine if they wish,” said Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California.

That’s essentially what Nixon and his supporters did when they raised money in the years after his resignation to build the Nixon center, he added.

“Donald Trump certainly has the right to build a Trump World if they want,” Naftali said. “The question is whether it becomes a federal archival facility and has the stamp of professionalism from the National Archives and Records administration? That’s the issue.”

He thinks Congress should consider passing a law, as it did with Nixon, to segregate artifacts and papers from Trump’s administration, which under federal law belong to the country, and treat them differently than they have for other presidents.

“What I’m worried about is that they would go to a facility that will have as its mission the continuation of the disinformation campaign that characterized much of the Trump years,” Naftali said. “I think it would be harmful to the country for a National Archives-administered library to be seen even tacitly as participating in the divisive, and as we saw on January 6th, deadly, misinformation of the Trump world.”

Are presidents guaranteed presidential libraries?

Not exactly, although every president since Herbert Hoover has a library in his name that is run by the National Archives and Records Administration. But it is not a guaranteed thing.

The legislation that allows for libraries has been changed over the years since it first passed into law in 1955 after Franklin D. Roosevelt established the first presidential library, using private funds, and then gave it to the National Archives. The legislation was amended in 1986 to cut down on costs, according to the…