President Donald Trump waves from the stairs of Air Force One on March 11.
Well, well, well. Looks like that sweet, sweet “settlement” money for President Donald Trump’s Presidential Library has gone on a walkabout. No one could possibly have predicted that the most corrupt president in history would do such a thing.
Now Senate Democrats are asking what, exactly, happened to the at least $63 million that Trump extracted from media and technology companies to settle his fake lawsuits against them.
It turns out that the fund set up to receive those millions, the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund, Inc., no longer exists—because of course it doesn’t.
Miami-Dade College’s parking lot, which was used by staff and faculty and is adjacent to the Freedom Tower, was given to President Donald Trump’s library fund for just $10.
The fund was set up in Florida, but state officials dissolved it in September 2025 after it failed to submit a mandatory annual report.
That might seem like nothing but an odd misstep, perhaps an inexperienced person serving as a registrant for the fund who didn’t understand the paperwork requirements. But that argument falls apart when you learn that the registrant was Jacob Roth, who was at a little law firm called Dhillon Law Group at the time.
Yes, that’s the firm that was founded by Harmeet Dhillon, who now heads the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice—not because she loves civil rights but because she’s an election denier and voter suppression enthusiast.
Roth formed Trump’s presidential inauguration committee fund—which also served as a sterling opportunity for big donors to bribe the president—and has raked in millions over the years that it’s represented Trump and his campaigns.
This is not some babe in the woods who didn’t understand what he was doing. Instead, it looks a lot more like an attempt to avoid filing any paperwork that would have revealed anything about this murky fund, letting Florida dissolve it instead.
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If that seems like an unduly cynical conclusion, it probably won’t when you learn that not long after the fund was dissolved, a new one called the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation, Inc., was created in December 2025. It reported receiving $50 million in contributions, but there’s no confirmation that this is where the faux-settlement money went.
And now, no one’s talking.
The White House says to ask Trump’s library, the foundation’s trustee won’t answer questions, and Roth referred questions to the Dhillon Law Group—a perfect closed circle of nonanswers.
When Trump first started collecting “donations” for his library by suing media companies for bribes, the amounts seemed impossibly large.
ABC gave him $15 million to “settle” his defamation lawsuit in December 2024, which was absolutely staggering at the time. But then there was $25 million from Meta, another $10 million from X, and $16 million from CBS, and suddenly bribing Trump became routine, just the cost of doing business.
But that’s piddly shit.
A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.
The real grift for the library has come in the form of the largesse of the GOP in Florida, exceedingly happy to give the property of their residents away to Trump.
In an elaborate scam, Miami-Dade College gave a state board overseen a downtown Miami parcel valued at more than $66 million for just $10. And the board then gave it to Trump’s library fund for another $10.
Yes, $10.
Even that pales in comparison to the $400 million jumbo jet bribe that Trump received from Qatar, which taxpayers get to pay to fix up but Trump gets to keep—also for his library.
Some back-of-the-envelope math here shows that this nonexistent library has already netted Trump a cool half-billion or so, and that’s just in the last 16 months.
He’s got almost three more years of being able to leverage his presidency into making the richest, most craven people give him even more money for a library that’s likely going to be nothing but pictures of Trump and evidence of his myriad bribes and crimes.
