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Miami’s Bonfire to Trump’s Vanities

October 19, 2025 | FlaglerLive | 6 Comments

The Miami skyline will have a new, Trump-sized addition. (© FlaglerLive)
The Miami skyline will have a new, Trump-sized addition. (© FlaglerLive)

By Diane Roberts

In New York, they brag about Broadway and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In Chicago, it’s Millennium Park and Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.

Arizona has the Grand Canyon; Colorado has the Rockies; New Mexico has Area 51.

Very nice, I’m sure.

Still, none of them can hold a chlorine-scented candle to Florida, home of the Waste Pro Garbage Truck Museum; the Bike-Riding Parrots of Sarasota Jungle Gardens; Big Betsy, Islamorada’s 30-foot high spiny lobster; not to mention the Beach Tomb of Morris the Cat in Gulfport or any of our other awesome contributions to culture.

Nobody’s ever seen anything like them.

But our state will soon have an even more important attraction.

Lordly. Majestic. Certain to be clad in 24 karat gold.

I speak, naturally, of the Trump Presidential Library Hotel and Massage Parlor soon to be built in Miami.

Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.

Miami Dade College had some land sitting there on its Wolfson campus and, instead of doing something stupid with it like make a park or a cultural center or housing for students or whatever, MDC’s Board of Trustees voted to give the land — worth a paltry $200-300 million — to the state.

They voted in secret, with no public comment and no community input, but who could possibly object to such a stable genius project?

The state will, in turn, give it to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation, which means the place will be controlled by the Trump family.

“President Trump has a great story to tell as a Florida resident,” says state Attorney General and swashbuckling scofflaw James Uthmeier. “I think it’s quite fitting that we house it … as Miami becomes kind of the capital of the world in many respects.”

New York, Mumbai, Beijing, London, Paris — y’all just shut up.

Suggestions that Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet members may aspire to higher office in the near future, and know they’d be wise to court Donald Trump’s favor, are unfair.

AG Uthmeier has just been endorsed by the president, but that’s because he’s the greatest. Nobody’s ever seen anybody like him.

Trump DNA

Second Son Eric Trump posted on social media (where woke rules of grammar, punctuation, syntax, and other boring so-called aspects of “English usage” totally do not apply): “Consistent with our families DNA, this will be one of the most beautiful buildings ever built, an icon on the Miami skyline.”

As we all know, Eric Trump is a brilliant and totally ethical businessman, and the Trumps have the most exquisite taste. Just look at what his father has done with the Oval Office.

Who knew you could get such gorgeous carved onlays from Home Depot!

It is true the parcel of land is a bit small, only 2.63 acres, especially compared to Lyndon Johnson’s 30 acres in Austin, Texas, or the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library’s 37 acres.

So what? Size does not matter and small can be beautiful: Look at the president’s hands!

You build tall, tall like the president himself, who is at least six-foot five. Maybe six.

How about 100 stories? That will beat the Panorama Tower, which everybody knows is not that beautiful.

The science nerds and climate change alarmists will tell you that since average elevation in Miami is two yards above sea level, and the site is pretty much on Biscayne Bay and about 300 feet from the Miami River, there’s a big danger of flooding.

Also, hurricanes.

No big deal. They can put the “library” part of the library lower down — that’s just books and paper and stuff — and the hotel and massage parlor — the important parts — on higher floors.

It’ll be a glittering palace on Biscayne, visible from space!

Just kidding about letting it flood. We’ll want to protect the priceless artifacts of America’s Golden Age.

Treasures such as the president’s collection of photo-shopped Time Magazine covers, the famous shoe with the piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of it, his hurricane-bending sharpies, his special copy of the Epstein “Birthday Book,” his diamond-studded ketchup bottle, and that world-famous 20-foot red necktie.

Sure, there are nay-sayers, carpers, whiners, complainers, boo-birds, and other losers making noise.

florida phoenixMiami Dade College President Emeritus Eduardo Padrón, a guy who obviously doesn’t understand the great honor being accorded MDC, says it’s “frankly unimaginable” this decision was made “without any real discussion of the consequences of what that will do to the college.”

A bunch of busybody pollsters have found that 74% of Miami-Dade residents want the college to keep the land.

Dr. Marvin Dunn, a professor of psychology at FIU, has filed a lawsuit on the ground that Miami Dade College state violated Florida’s Sunshine laws.

The suit claims the public notice posted by the MDC board did not say they would talk about giving away taxpayer-funded property, but just said they’d “discuss potential real estate transactions.”

Picky, picky, picky.

That Dunn guy is such a troublemaker, always going around telling people about Black history and whatnot, just to make them sad.

Now you’ve got a bunch of fuss bunnies banging on about how the Trump library/hotel/massage parlor site is next to Miami’s Freedom Tower, which some of those never-satisfied Cubans see as sacred or something.

‘Ellis Island of the South’

Yeah, it’s the “Ellis Island of the South,” the place Cubans who ran from the communists in 1959 went to get papers and medical care, learn English, and receive help settling in Miami, where they began taking over, speaking a foreign language, insisting white people eat Ropa Vieja and drink good coffee, and attacking the integrity of American tooth enamel with their lethal Tres Leches cakes.

Some of them actually protested on the future site of what Eric Trump so rightly calls “the greatest Presidential Library ever built, honoring the greatest President our Nation has ever known.”

Tessa Petit, who runs some wild lib outfit called the Florida Immigrant Coalition, says “it’s ridiculous they’re putting a library of someone who represents everything that is contrary to freedom, someone who’s making it his mission to destroy immigrant families, next to the Freedom Tower.”

One woman, whose family left Cuba in the early 1960s, said she’s against it because the president has “a track record of destroying civic engagement and only supporting those world views that are in alignment with his own.”

Another Cuban-born radical named Yousi Mazpule, a Miami Dade College professor, calls it “a slap in the face,” telling WLRN she objects to the library/tower/massage parlor “being put right next to the Freedom Tower where so many Cubans ran from a dictator.”

That’s gratitude for you — after all the president has done for Cubans!

A bunch of them are currently getting free room and board in federal detention centers.

The Trump administration has revoked so-called “temporary humanitarian parole” for about 300,000.

Our dedicated Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem explains that Cuba, like Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Haiti, and Venezuela, are now perfectly safe, really nice places that probably have great malls.

Yes, the Cubans used to be welcome as refugees from communism, but that was before Kristi Noem was born, so she’s never heard about it and it doesn’t matter.

Now they qualify for a free trip home to Havana and, if ICE won’t let them take their small children or spouses, and they have to fly back wearing shackles, well, that what they get for being, like, foreign.

In the meantime, the Trump Freedom Tower Biscayne Hotel, Library, and Massage Parlor will draw crowds of pilgrims from all over the world, from Idaho to Oklahoma, to stay in one of its luxurious MAGA suites and worship at his shrine, drawn in like bugs to a glue trap.

Florida should be proud.

diane roberts columnist Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Deborah Coffey says

    October 19, 2025 at 2:30 pm

    A massage parlor? Trump just can’t get over the loss of Jeffrey Epstein. Vomitous!

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  2. Messages for George says

    October 19, 2025 at 2:36 pm

    This sounds great.. a message parlor.. George Santos probably has a two week reservation booked. Poor guy, all shooken up from jail.

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  3. john stove says

    October 19, 2025 at 2:41 pm

    It will sink into the ground due to the weight of pure bulls**t……and eventually a hurricane will come and destroy it and all its content will be scattered to the wind only to be picked up and unceremoniously thrown into the landfill of obscurity.

    This imbecilic moron of a “President” and its cult will forever be taught in schools around the world as the worst elected leader ever along with the buffoons’ who allowed him to grift and con the US taxpayers out of millions of dollars.

    Oh….did I mention he is a multiple convicted felon pedophile?

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  4. Daniel Lopez says

    October 19, 2025 at 3:17 pm

    I heard that the area storing Presidential papers will resemble a store room and bathroom

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  5. Laurel says

    October 19, 2025 at 3:32 pm

    My poor Florida, now the laughing stock of the country. As I mentioned before, while driving across the Georgia/Florida state line, there is a large sign that reads “Welcome to the Free State of Florida,” as if all other states are not free. As if DeSantis made Florida free.

    I was born in the already free state of Florida.
    I was raised in the already free state of Florida.
    I spent my whole, adult life in the already free state of Florida.

    The sign should read “Welcome to the Embarrassed State of Florida.”

    We were recently at Honeymoon Island and Caladesi State Park. Of course, the embarrassment follows, as the state park is forced to show off a big sign about “The Gulf of America.” My whole life, no one ever gave a damn about the name “Gulf of Mexico.” In fact, no one ever mentioned it, or even thought of it for that matter. These signs are about as important as the old man in the rocking chair at Cracker Barrel disappearing. Can people get more petty? More childish? More wasteful?

    Yes, apparently, they can. Trump continues to build monuments to himself, shamelessly. People continue to kiss his ass looking for favor. I wish he and DeSantis would get the hell out of Florida, and take their wasted tax paid signs with them, and that includes “Alligator Alcatraz.” Then, we can hopefully become less embarrassed again, and the State of Florida can become free of this foolishness.

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  6. Verna says

    October 19, 2025 at 4:29 pm

    So I see we have idiots here who believe the sky is green and the grass is blue too.

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