Fireworks and fanfare greeted the opening of the Donald J Trump Presidential Library Casino & Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, today.
President Trump, aged 84, attended the ceremony in handcuffs, allowed out on day release from the Mohawk Correctional Facility, New York, where he is serving a life sentence for murder and selling US military secrets to Russia.
“This was the biggest, the best Presidential Library opening ever,” said Trump, despite Las Vegas fire marshals insisting that the opening of the Reagan Library and the Obama Library had both drawn larger crowds. “Just look at the ratings – huge!
“Can Obama say that his Presidential Library has the loosest slots in town? I don’t think so. Loser.”
The grand opening allowed the public their first view of the long-awaited Library Casino & Resort, offering insights into the presidency of one of America’s most contentious and divisive Commanders in Chief.
Visitors flocked to the Hall of Lies, which famously had to be expanded twice during construction as the original Room of Lies proved inadequate to handle the mounting tally of untruths and misrepresentations, topping 250,000 by the end of his term of office.
The hall is covered from floor to ceiling with Trump’s most outrageous claims and statements. Press a finger to any one of them, and a recording tells visitors the truth behind the story.
Trump’s greatest hits in the Hall of Lies include: Ukraine, not Russia, interfered with the 2016 election; Article II of the Constitution allows Trump to “do whatever I want”; that the Mueller Report “totally exonerated” Trump; that windmills cause cancer; that America will put astronauts on Mars “very soon”; and that Trump “won” the 2020 presidential election that he lost.
Just as the Nixon Library has a room dedicated to the Watergate cover-up and the incriminating tapes that led to the President’s resignation, so the Trump Library features a series of rooms dedicated to his most notorious political scandals.
There is a Russia-collusion room, a room filled with caged immigrant children (sweetly portrayed by local schoolchildren), and the overcrowded Nepotism Room. The Trump Bankruptcy Room highlights the president’s many ventures that have ended in financial disaster, including his tax returns for the years 2010 to 2024.
The Stable Genius Room features Trump’s proclamations about his own talents, having said he knows more than anybody about almost everything. Among the highlights: “I understand money better than anybody.” “Nobody knows more about technology than me.” “Nobody knows more about taxes than I do.” “Nobody knows more about trade than me.” “I know more about courts than any human being on Earth.” “I know more about renewables [energy] than any human being on Earth.” Each display features a computer database containing the names of tens of millions of people who know more about each subject than President Trump.
The Room of Wives includes life-like displays about all Trump’s wives: Ivana, Marla Maples, Melania, and Ivanka Trump – even though the Supreme Court finally ruled against Trump’s Executive Order overthrowing the prohibition against parents marrying their children and annulling Ivanka’s marriage to Jared Kushner. The Melania Trump display is especially realistic, and the frozen smile on the waxwork figure’s face is as immobile as on the real Melania.
Interactive virtual reality displays allow visitors to take part in history: you can brazenly lie while testifying in the Russian collusion scandal, hurl insults at pandemic epidemiologist Dr Anthony Fauci, sing the praises of white supremacists, and give massive tax cuts to billionaires.
Another virtual reality presentation transports visitors into the heart of the audience thronging Trump’s 2017 inauguration ceremony, allowing users to “guess the size of the crowd.” Whatever your guess, Trump’s voice can be heard booming: “Wrong! It was much, much bigger, the biggest crowd ever!”
Trump hired the interior designers behind his garish Trump Tower apartment to design the Library & Casino Resort, which is dripping with gold-leaf and mirrors, Rococo flourishes and grandiose oil paintings depicting Trump as a Greek god, a Roman Emperor, an Egyptian Pharaoh, and as Napoleon — all playing golf.
“It’s the most tasteful library in the world,” Trump tweeted from prison during construction last year. “It’s got more taste than a bucket of KFC spicy chicken wings, and I should know. I know more about KFC chicken wings than anyone else on Earth.”
The addition of gaming tables throughout, and the constant clattering and ringing of electronic slot machines, make the Trump Presidential Library Casino & Resort alive with a cacophony of sounds, in addition to being the only Presidential Library in America to be open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
The Hall of Tweets boasts four LED walls showing a continual loop of Trump’s 50,000 tweets while in office. At 3 a.m. each morning a door swings open to a full-scale copy of the President’s White House bathroom, where a life-size animatronic version of Trump sits on the toilet pecking at his iPhone with thick stubby fingers to send out Tweets until the door closes again at 7 a.m.. A television tuned to Fox News flickers in the background.
The Trump World Room features the world map as the president envisioned it, had he been allowed to purchase Greenland for the US, sell off Puerto Rico, and annex Canada and Northern Mexico. Trump’s designated “shit-hole countries” do not even appear on the map.
Proving most popular on opening day was the Sex Scandal Room, with exhibits featuring more than 60 women who accused Trump of sexual harassment, assault or impropriety. Life-size mannequins of thirty of Trump’s best-known accusers, including porn star Stormy Daniels, ‘The Apprentice’ contestant Summer Zervos, and former model Kristin Anderson, are on display, where visitors are encouraged to “grab them by the pussy,” as Trump famously boasted.
The Interregnum Room contains artifacts from the 18 month period after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election but refused to leave, holed up in the White House protected by a small but loyal group of Secret Service agents, National Guard, Republican National Committee executives and members of the Aryan brotherhood.
There are the MAGA sandbags that filled the White House windows, the Presidential Seal that Trump redesigned to include an ad for Trump Resorts, and a reproduction of the Oval Office’s historic Resolute desk that he sold to a Chinese billionaire for $10 million to fund his private army.
A continuous video reel also shows the now-infamous footage of Trump, shortly after his ouster from the White House, shooting an innocent stranger on Fifth Avenue, and the look of horror on the president’s face when he was actually arrested for the crime he had long boasted he could get away with. Another video presentation shows his trial on corruption charges for selling military secrets to Russia.
Critics have noted that the Trump Library was funded by public donations dwarfed by a $50 million gift from Russia. President for Life Vladimir Putin even laid the foundation stone for the Library in 2024.
The Library features a full-scale reproduction of the maximum security prison cell in which President Trump is currently incarcerated, accurate in detail down to the gold-plated toilet and sink he had installed, and the television set that only plays the America One network. Though Trump had taken the extraordinary measure of pardoning himself of all crimes on his last day in office, the Supreme Court later ruled that his pardon did not extend to future crimes committed after leaving office.
One room of the Library is dedicated to Trump’s singular appearance. Here, video of nuclear physicists, structural engineers and origami experts explain the intricate machinations of Trump’s hairstyling technique, unworldly orange skin coloration, and how a man demonstrably sedentary, overweight and out of shape repeatedly earned seemingly impossible perfect medical evaluations from his doctors.
In a nod to one of Trump’s enduring obsessions, a room is devoted to explaining “Obamagate,” which Trump had called “The biggest political crime in history, by far!” The room is empty.
A rollercoaster ride, dubbed ‘Trump’s Economy’, winds around the exterior of the building, taking guests through a stomach-churning series of twists and turns before dumping them with a precipitous fall.
There is also plenty to entertain the discerning visitor beyond the Library’s historic offerings.
Guests can indulge in Trump’s version of fine dining at the Covfefe shop café, which sells a selection of exorbitantly over-priced food and drinks, along with Trump’s personal culinary favorites: Big Mac burgers and fries, and Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches, as served at the Trump White House.
The Trump Library Casino & Resort also features an outdoor nightclub, ‘The Swamp,’ which features a pool that is drained hourly, where partygoers can dance before it floods again. An indoor discotheque, The Deep State, is a private members-only club.
The gift shop, here named The Grift Shop, sells souvenir bottles of Trump’s signature line of steel-hold hairspray, orange skin makeup and bronzer, along with the obligatory MAGA caps, t-shirts, mugs and Grab ‘Em By The Pussy lambskin gloves with ‘Sensa-Touch’ fingertips.
The grand opening also brought together a rare gathering of the five other living presidents: George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kim Kardashian, who last month stepped up from the vice presidency on the tragic death of her husband, President Kanye West, from exhaustion while on a pilgrimage walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain and carrying a heavy wooden cross on his back.
Within minutes of the Library Casino & Resort opening, however, patrons began to complain that the roulette tables were rigged, croupiers were dealing off the bottom of the deck, and slot machines were failing to pay winnings.
“It’s the best Presidential Library in history,” shouted Trump as he was led away in shackles after the ribbon-cutting ceremony. “And I should know – I’ve been in more libraries than anybody on Earth.”
A spokesman for the Mohawk Correctional Facility, New York, noted that Trump has not borrowed a single book from the prison library during his five years of incarceration.
Image: By oinonio from New York City, USA – The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library, CC BY-SA 2.0
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