There is a certain kind of man who, upon being told that people are marching in the streets with signs reading “No Kings,” responds by announcing plans to build a glittering glass skyscraper-palace, complete with golden idols of himself. Civilization may yet survive, but irony clearly has not.

That man is, of course, President Donald Trump, who rolled out AI-generated renderings for his future presidential library by way of Truth Social. The library, if that word retains any meaning, will be a roughly fifty-story tower rising over downtown Miami, specifically over a nearly three-acre plot of land that Miami Dade College gifted to the Trump Foundation, in a shady backroom deal, valued at more than $67 million.

It’s essentially another Trump Tower that’s been given a MAGA makeover, with the word TRUMP glowing near the top and a red-white-and-blue spire jabbing at the clouds (though, no doubt a red baseball cap on top was considered). The ninety-second AI video rendering includes a replica Oval Office in its current garish splendor, a posh ballroom, rooftop gardens, and the luxury jet gifted by Qatar. There is also, naturally, a golden escalator deliberately evoking the one Trump descended at Trump Tower, New York, in 2015 to announce his first presidential campaign.

What it does not yet appear to have? A construction start date, an end date, or much of the humble archival seriousness one normally associates with a project like this. A presidential library is supposed to conjure images of the boring essential paperwork of governance: papers, records, memos, cables, meeting notes, the bureaucratic detritus of actual decision-making. Trump’s, by contrast, will contain a golden statue, a golden escalator, some jets, and replicas of places Trump likes.

The word “library” is doing an extraordinary amount of work in that title, though in fairness, a man whose literary canon consists of Sun Tzu and his own ghostwritten memoirs was never going to build the New York Public Library. It will likely contain fewer books than an airport Hudson News.

As someone who worked undercover in Chicago’s Trump Tower (and got kicked out on Inauguration Day 2017), let me offer my own prediction for what the finished building will actually contain: forty-seven floors (he is, after all, the forty-seventh president, and no branding opportunity shall go unexploited), a casino, condos marketed to foreign investors at prices that constitute their own kind of diplomatic overture, a handful of tourist shops selling MAGA hats and “Trump 47” shot glasses, a couple of mid-tier restaurants with gold-leaf menus, and — tucked somewhere on the upper floors, charging a not-insignificant admission fee — the presidential library proper.

You can imagine the gift shop already: commemorative coins, branded golf towels, “presidential” steak knives, maybe a MAGA snow globe of the Situation Room. Modesty, as ever, is not a Trump family value.

The Trump Presidential Library looks exactly like the lair of who Donald Trump has always secretly wanted to be: the bad guy from a 1985 action film. Possibly a James Bond villain. It has the mirrored surfaces, the in-your-face luxury, the sense that somewhere on the forty-seventh floor a henchman is being informed that “Mr Trump is displeased.”

It’s a well-worn trope among filmmakers to house a supervillain in an imposing glass-and-steel modernist structure — we might as well put our B-movie president there. Miami, of course, is the perfect setting for such an enterprise. New York gave Trump his original tower, Chicago gave him his riverfront chrome obelisk, but Miami — a tacky oceanfront city already awash in speculative wealth, which may eventually sink into the ocean due to climate change — makes for the perfect trifecta. A hat trick befitting of our plutocratic commander in chief.

Once again, it is worth marveling at the timing. Eight million people showed up at last weekend’s No Kings protests, holding signs that simply say the United States was founded as a republic, not a monarchy, and that its president should probably act like it. Trump’s response, delivered the very week the visibility of the movement was peaking, was to release footage of a skyscraper bearing his name, a golden statue of himself, and a throne room, with paid parking. So, yes, faced with age, scandal, protest, history, and the ordinary indignities of mortality, Trump’s instinct is once again to build upward — taller, shinier, louder, more phallic, and more impossible to ignore, erected against the terror of smallness. Overcompensating? Perhaps. But that may be a question for Stormy Daniels.

And yet there’s a case to be made that this is the most honest presidential library ever proposed, that it simply makes explicit what all these temples of self-commemoration are doing. Trump has never been in the business of pretending that the point of a skyscraper emblazoned with his name is anything other than building a skyscraper bearing his name. Though it resembles the world’s biggest avant-garde tombstone, Barack Obama’s Presidential Center in Chicago, opening later this spring, promises to be full of gee-whiz-it’s-all-about-you-folks faux humble bullshit on the inside.

Trump’s is an unironic self-celebratory monument, complete with a towering golden statue of the president standing with fist raised, recreating the famous image from the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. It’s to be visible from the ocean, daring you to tell him he’s not a king.

The people with the protest signs will have their work cut out for them.