Florida Circuit Judge Mavel Ruiz sure has a lot of nerve. Who is she to stand in the way of Gov. Ron DeSantis handing over one of the sweetest remaining undeveloped parcels in downtown Miami to President Donald Trump? Doesn’t she know he needs it for his library?
On Tuesday, Ruiz temporarily blocked Miami Dade College from transferring a 2.63-acre chunk of downtown Miami property to Trump’s foundation for his planned presidential library. A 2025 assessment valued the land at $67 million, but one real estate expert suggested it could actually be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis
To begin with, “foundation” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It’s not so much a foundation as it is some fellow travelers in grift. The trustees are Eric Trump; Tiffany Trump’s husband, Michael Boulos; and Trump’s personal attorney, James Kiley.
So, yes, the Florida government just gave the Trump family an eight- or nine-figure gift. Here’s how it went down.
Miami Dade College, a state-run school, owns the parcel, and an agenda released ahead of a special meeting of the school’s Board of Trustees on Sept. 23 said nothing about giving millions of dollars to Trump. Instead, it just said that it would consider conveying some undefined property to an undefined state fund overseen by DeSantis.
Then the meeting was not livestreamed, unlike every other board meeting this year. And after the board gave the property over to the state, DeSantis and pals waited a week before voting to deed it to Trump’s library foundation.
But the Florida GOP played themselves here.
The craven desire to suck up to Trump seems to have made them forget that, for all of its faults, Florida has a very robust set of sunshine laws. Failing to provide any level of detail or access to the meeting where they decided to give the president this gift was always going to come back to bite them.
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The block is temporary, and Ruiz even told the college that it could solve this by just putting out a proper public notice and holding another meeting for another vote. But nope. It’s going to appeal instead. Nothing says “this is totally above board” like refusing to do your business in public.
It isn’t clear why Trump can’t just purchase that land from the good citizens of Florida at fair market value. Heck, some back-of-the-envelope math shows he’s extorted $63 million already in sham lawsuit settlements as “donations” to his library.
Or perhaps he could take out a loan against his freebie $400 million plane from the Qataris, which will be paid for by taxpayers so Trump can keep it in his library.
Unfortunately for Trump, since this is all happening in state court, he can’t go racing to his Big Friends on the Supreme Court to fix this.
But DeSantis will probably just threaten Florida’s judiciary instead.
