Leaning on his background as a real estate developer — and claiming “I’m a really good builder, and I build on budget on time” — President Donald Trump offered to lend his expertise, such as it is, to former President Barack Obama, whose ambitious Presidential Center project in Chicago remains incomplete.
Trump said that he would like to help Obama because, as he sees it, the project remaining unfinished is “bad for the presidency.”
Trump took the opportunity to trot out his most called-upon culprits, blaming the “disaster” of the incomplete project on DEI and wokeness, saying that Obama didn’t want “good hard tough mean construction workers” to build it, but instead said he hired people who “never did it before.”
Can confirm that the people working on Obama's presidential center keep doing land acknowledgments and screaming their pronouns so no work is getting done. https://t.co/QGAU94XHiC
— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) May 6, 2025
Trump said that if Obama didn’t want his help — and there is a strong sentiment in the comments that he doesn’t — Trump could “recommend professionals.”
One of the President’s key sources of information, Fox News, ran a story in March about DOGE canceling the lease on the current Obama Library, from which materials are intended to be removed and housed in the new Obama Presidential Center upon completion. (It’s the Center that Trump is referring to when he says “library.”)
The Obama Presidential Center will offer programming that will invite visitors—whether they’re coming from down the block or across the globe—to bring change home.
— The Obama Foundation (@ObamaFoundation) December 27, 2024
This year we continued to make significant construction progress inside Jackson Park. Learn more about the 19-acre… pic.twitter.com/NySaD0j0WD
Fox reported:
The Obama Presidential Center is expected to open some time next year and has been plagued by delays and cost overruns. It was initially expected to cost $350 million but that figure ballooned to $830 million in 2021. It is unclear what the total costs will be.
It will consist of a 235-foot tower museum, a branch of the Chicago Public Library, conference facilities, a gymnasium and a regulation-sized NBA court. It will also house the nonprofit Obama Foundation, which is overseeing the center’s development.
The project is also facing legal problems due to a dispute between the New York-based firm Thornton Tomasetti, the project’s structural engineer, and the Black-owned Chicago-based subcontractor II in One which is suing Thornton Tomasetti.
The plaintiff claims construction delays were caused by the New York firm, which it alleges made the “improper and unanticipated decision to impose rebar spacing and tolerance requirements that differed from the American Concrete Institute standards.”
The lawsuit, according to Newsweek, asserts that the structural engineer claimed the delays “were all unequivocally driven by the underperformance and inexperience of the concrete sub-contractor.”
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