Obama's 'Presidential Library' is Neither

It has been likened to a trash can, a prison guard tower or the world’s most outrageous example of brutalist design. Compared to President Trump’s neoclassical Big Beautiful Ballroom, it is nothing less than an architectural disaster. Stalin would be proud, and perhaps that was the design idea all along, to emulate communism.

To say the Obama Library has ballooned in costs is an understatement. Original estimate in 2016 was $300M. Current price tag is $850M, and climbing. Payroll too, rising from $18.5M in 2018 to $43.7M in 2024. Staffing hit 337 under the direction of Valerie Jarrett, called Obama’s whisperer, who earns $740K a year as CEO. Despite all this, reports the New York Post, the library is desperate for staff, soliciting 100 unpaid volunteers. Maybe these folks like top-heavy architecture in staffing too.

From the beginning, planners insisted on privileging minority and female contractors. The result: long delays, much infighting and at least one lawsuit still pending — from a black-owned subcontractor II in One Concrete, which is seeking $40 million from structural engineer Thornton Tomasetti for racial discrimination over alleged blame-shifting for cost overruns, claims Tomasetti denies.

A larger lawsuit, by Protect Our Parks, argued for five years that siting the Obama building in Jackson Place — on the National Register of Historic Places — was an environmental insult to the cause of preservation. The district court dismissed the case, as did the appellate court, and the Supreme Court declined to intervene. Meanwhile the city of Chicago still owns the 19.3 acres of public parkland, which is leased to the Obama Foundation for 99 years, for the nominal fee of $10.

None of this shocks me, as historian and American, as much as the news that the Obama compound is private — despite the fact that Chicago and Illinois taxpayers chipped in $300 million in infrastructure costs. Oh and there will be no books in Obama’s Library, except digitized ones. Worse, unlike every other center for presidential research, the Obama Library is not affiliated with the National Archives, though NARA says it might “loan” docs for rotating exhibits from time to time.

I guess that’s one way to keep private the July 28, 2016 meeting in the Oval Office where President Obama convened a rogue’s panel — including FBI Director James Comey, CIA’s John Brennan, DNI James Clapper, and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates — to find intelligence on Russian interference/hacking in the 2016 election.

This action set off a five-year assault on Donald Trump during his first term, hounding him and handcuffing him with charges that were all disproved morsels of disinformation. Some think Obama should go to jail for this.

“It should shake every single American in their shoes. I hate to say this, but President Barack Obama, there is now incontrovertible evidence that he was the spearhead of a seditious conspiracy to subvert the will of the American people and overthrow the United States government back in 2016,” said Jason Meister, a Trump ally, recently on Newsmax. “We must, absolutely must, hold every one of these criminals accountable for the crimes that they committed. They are the most heinous crimes committed in American history.”

So if it’s not a library, what is it? Barack Obama calls his presidential center “a university of community activism…for people who refuse to accept the status quo.”

Like him.

The 44th president spent his entire career as a community organizer trying to stir animus among racial groups. Tribalism, identity politics — anything in the cause of disrupting the history and colorblind norms of American culture. That the country now seems on the brink of civil war — red state against blue, MAGA against Marxists, ideologues against law-and-order types — is due in no small measure to his campaign to divide Americans — a crusade he euphemistically dubbed ‘the audacity of hope.’

Recently he used the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s funeral to attack the current president — who wasn’t invited to the funeral even though as a private citizen Donald J. Trump did more to help Jackson than any of the three Dem presidents who hammered Trump at the funeral. Trump reportedly underwrote Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, even as establishment Democrats froze Jackson out of power, preferring Walter Mondale, who lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan running on a strong economy.

Coming out of retirement for the 2026 elections, Obama called the MAGA movement “bullies” and “bigots.” He should know.

Obama has selected Juneteenth this week to open the surrounding park to the public, as always eager to memorialize himself as the nation’s first black president. Remember when Michelle Obama disclosed that she had never been proud of her country before it elected her husband as the first black president? Sometimes I think she spoke for both of them, alluding to the 43M whites who voted for him. Official opening is planned for June 18-21, if construction is finished.

Chicago residents, black and white, have made no secret of their disdain for the project, which they say mars the downtown skyline and robs Chicago of needed parks.

In sum, this is a building with no books, no archival material, and lots of instruction on how to defund the police, protest against ICE and champion the elite. Oh, and a regulation-sized basketball court. Perfect.