Miami – Can Freedom Tower in Miami have a Maga attraction as a neighbor?
According to Trump’s organizational lawyers, Eric Trump visited earlier this year, who visited the car park next to a historic building in downtown Miami earlier this year and visited the car park next to a historic building in downtown Miami.
According to multiple sources, the Biscayne Boulevard land owned by Miami-Dade College is gaining attention as a potential library site with ample space for President Donald Trump to secure freely from Qatar and display the Boeing 747 jets he wants to be the star feature of his post-presidential center.
Miami-Dade College also owns Freedom Tower, an iconic building that fled the dictatorship of Fidel Castro and welcomed Cubans. School representatives could not comment Thursday.
While Trump’s Miami supporters are trying to plead with the library in their own way, the president himself appears to have his favourite site about 45 miles away. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Trump’s team is close to an agreement to build a presidential library on free land provided by Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Sources familiar with the Miami Push have confirmed that the FAU appears to be a preferred choice, and are striving to market the downtown site as a satellite location aimed at a steady stream of Miami vacation homes and business travelers.
“It would be smaller and attract tourists,” said a source familiar with the plan.
But a Miami lawyer representing Trump’s resort business said he sees the two-acre Miami-Dade College site between Northeast Fifth Street and Northeast Sixth Street as still viable for the main library.
“In my opinion, Miami Dade College’s property is the most impressive site for the Presidential Library,” said Felix Lasarte, whom Miami lawyer Trump, hired after leaving his office in 2021 to secure approval for the expansion of Trump National Doral Golf Resort.
Lasarte said he has been in touch with Trump after the 2024 election, but is working with the Trump organization primarily as a Miami lawyer.
The FAU’s main position reflects that multiple sources are the increasingly declining position of Florida International University.
The Miami Herald reported in January that the Palm Beach County FAU is considered Trump’s favorite, and Fiu wants to convince the president’s camp that it’s close to Miami-Dade County’s global appeal, Trump Doral Resort and the new red politics. In November, Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate to win Miami-Dade since 1988, beating Kamala Harris 11 points. Palm Beach County remains blue, and Harris beat Trump by less than one point. Eric Trump also visited FIU as part of the library hunt, Lasarte said.
However, the FAU is less than 25 miles from Trump’s home, located at a private club he owns in Palm Beach, Mar Arago. Miami is about 70 miles by car from the palace-like oceanfront facility.
A FIU representative could not comment Thursday. Lasarte said he is pitching FIU as a good option, including the library potential on the school’s waterfront campus north of Miami. “Obviously, the FIU site would be great too,” he said.
So far, the Trump Library’s known potential sites are owned by schools under state control. In other words, Gov. Ron DeSantis will act as a land benefactor if Trump Camp signs a contract before the governor who was termed in 2026 leaves.
A FAU spokesman could not comment Thursday.
If Miami-Dade College tries to match free land with the FAU, this means that the Trump Library will abandon the potential development benefits of commuting schools. Parking by Freedom Tower is located across from the new Miami World Center retail complex in the heart of downtown Miami.
Downtown’s Trump Library pays tribute to the president who primarily sides his massive deportation efforts next to the iconic structures associated with the historic embrace of migrants in Miami. One of Miami’s first skyscrapers, the building served as a Cuban refugee centre in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Republican-controlled Congress in Florida is about to build a library in a state in the sunshine, Trump, a longtime New Yorker who is now a Florida resident. Earlier this year, Congress passed a law prohibiting local governments from passing ordinances restricting presidential libraries, making the state an authority over future Trump libraries.
“The overall intention behind the bill was to try and deploy a welcome mat for Florida’s first presidential library,” said Sen. Jason Brodur, a Republican from Central Florida and a sponsor of the bill.
If the Miami downtown site wins Trump’s favor, the resulting building in downtown city would be far higher than that would be built on Fau, a suburban campus next to Boca Raton Airport.
As Lasarte envisions that, downtown Miami Trump Library will rise south of Freedom Tower. He refused to enter into the details of the kind of structure being sold for the place, but Lasarte said the design would accommodate the president’s plane if Trump could take it with him when he took office.
“I think you can fit the Air Force into that site,” he said.
Miami Herald staff writer Garrett Shanley contributed to this report.
