Donald Trump accepts secondhand security-compromised junk airplane from Qatar! Boeing must respond!

The Department of Defense, on behalf of Donald Trump, last month accepted, and hopes to transform into Air Force One, a Boeing luxury 747-8 worth about $400 million from Qatar. 

Echo opinion published in Seattle Times by Robert Weiner and Coby Rinke

There are questions, but also very serious ethical concerns surrounding the gift. Its acceptance could potentially violate the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause and put an American president under the influence of leaders of the oil-rich nation.

But, there is another issue at play: The plane is incapable of being Air Force One, in the first place.

Boeing, whose previous contract to deliver two Air Force Ones is about five years late and billions over budget, should take responsibility. Instead of allowing the U.S. government to spend a billion more of taxpayer dollars to essentially start over on another aircraft, the company should make it clear to the U.S. government that the Qatari jet was never meant to be an Air Force One, and cannot be made so in a timely manner. 

Making this clear would benefit Boeing and the nation.

First, as retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey has explained, the Qataris would likely not hand over the jet unaltered.

“It will have hundreds of bugs in it; there’s no way to sort out the security of it,” McCaffrey told KING 5 Seattle.

Even some Republicans echoed McCaffrey’s concerns. When asked how much it would cost to ensure the plane is safe for the president, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida questioned if that was even possible.

“I don’t know how you would be able to do that if you don’t build it from scratch,” Scott said.

Second, while Trump has presented the plane as the pinnacle of luxury, this is far from the truth. Qatar has reportedly been trying to get rid of the jet since 2020, and the fact leaders were willing to give it away when the Trump administration asked shows how little they valued it. Furthermore, the plane was actually manufactured before the two planes originally intended to be the new Air Force Ones, meaning it is far from the most modern.

Finally and most egregiously, as Boeing knows, most of the cost of a new Air Force One is not building the jet itself. Instead, the cost comes from outfitting the plane to be able to refuel midair, communicate securely with the military — even in a worst-case scenario — and protect the president from attack.

Therefore, outfitting this new plane could cost the American taxpayers $1 billion. If the overrun costs on the earlier contract with Boeing are any indication, the final cost could be much higher. Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina acknowledged this when speaking to NBC News.

“Air Force One is not like every other Boeing, and it’s going to have to be put through a lot of paces and every square inch analyzed before the president should consider it his primary means of transportation,” Tillis said.

He further questioned whether outfitting the jet was even worth it.

“You have to work through the cost benefit of it; I mean we’re in a world of DOGE, so we’ve got to figure out whether it’s worth upfitting or selling it and writing a check to the Treasury and help us with our debt reduction,” Tillis said.

Most of the responsibility for the ethical and practical concerns surrounding the jet falls on the shoulders of the president, and his decision to accept it without Congress’ approval.

Nevertheless, Boeing must accept responsibility for failing to deliver the original Air Force Ones on time and within budget. To prevent taxpayers from funding a billion-dollar fantasy that this secondhand, security-compromised Qatari jet could be fit to carry the president of the United States, Boeing should finally finish what it started back in 2016. For the sake of itself and the nation, it must complete work and meet the latest deadline on the two original Air Force Ones.

Republicans cannot possibly ignore the Donald Trump corruption evident for all to see in the Qatar flying brothel "bribe jet"

Trump’s Qatar Airplane Problem Keeps Flying

Echo essay published in Washington Monthly by James D. Zirin

The president’s (corrupt) inability to distinguish between public and private interests reaches new heights with the gift of a foreign 747.

Qatari jet gift turns spotlight on Trump graft allegations

Donald Trump’s Middle East trip took him to three countries where his company has significant investments, including an 80-floor hotel in the United Arab Emirates, Trump-branded apartments in Saudi Arabia, and a $5.5 billion golf club in Qatar.

Trump is, of course, comfortable receiving a private jet as a “gift” from the Qatari royal family. This act has legal, ethical, and security concerns that even the president’s most loyal allies have questioned. The plane will be given to the Department of Defense and then become the exclusive property of the Trump Presidential Library after he leaves office. It will, therefore, be available to Trump for the rest of his life.

Presidential aircraft have not only security but also defense capabilities. If you try to imagine, say, Beijing, offering to refurbish the Situation Room, the president’s private residence in the White House, the Oval Office, and the presidential limousine, someone might say, “Beware the Chinese even bearing gifts.”

In addition to being a form of transport, the aircraft is used for war planning, is a de facto residence for the president, and includes a bedroom and shower.

No White House would allow a Beijing crew to redo 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  

To ensure the plane’s security, it would require ripping it apart. No wonder Kathleen Clark, an ethics specialist at Washington University Law School, told PBS that the gift is no boon for taxpayers. The government’s costs are projected to exceed a billion dollars.

“The government isn’t getting the equivalent of Air Force One for free, Clark said. “They’re getting an airplane frame that they will then have to—as you say—strip down and examine” for surveillance devices, then rebuild from the studs. “This is no bargain. It’s not even a corrupt bargain. It’s just corrupt.”

Trump is famously incapable of observing long-standing lines between public service and private profit. Another name for such tendencies is corruption. The Constitution couldn’t have quite anticipated a president’s refusal to form a blind trust and keep a hand in his businesses while in office. Still, they drew red lines since the Founders were petrified that foreign monarchies would try to overthrow their new government. The president had to be a natural-born citizen, senators citizens for 14 years, and representatives for seven. And gifts from abroad were blatantly forbidden.

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution provides, as follows:

[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States] shall, without the consent of the Congress accept of any present, Emolument…of any kind from any King, Prince or foreign state.”

Trump once said he wanted to “terminate” the Constitution to overturn the 2020, election and reinstate him to power. 

When it comes to terminating the Constitution, beware the opening wedge. The Constitution is but a detail that always seems to get in his way.

Amber Phillips, a Washington Post political reporter, points out that Trump’s dealings with the Middle East are just one aspect of his conflicts of interest, involving lobbyists leading government agencies, selling Bibles, earning millions off cryptocurrency, and more.

“Conflicts of interest are the hallmark of both of Trump’s presidencies,” Meredith McGehee, an independent expert on Congress and advocacy, government ethics, and money in politics, told The Washington Post. “The fact that he got away with a lot of apparent conflicts in his first term, I think, has emboldened him in his second. The magnitude is jaw-dropping.”

According to Phillips, here’s the deal.

Lobbyists. He’s elevated lobbyists to senior government roles:  Trump 1.0 tried to keep lobbyists from taking positions in government, but in Trump 2.0, oil and mining lobbyists with deep ties to their industries are leading energy policy for the U.S. government, according to the Campaign Legal Center. Trump has also relaxed the reins on what foreign lobbyists can do, which “leaves the United States susceptible to hostile foreign influence,” CLC reports.

Firing Watchdog Officials. Many of Trump’s moves are being fought in the courts. He fired inspectors general and other watchdog officials who probe corruption in the government. He may have ignored the law to do it. The watchman sometimes waketh in vain, but it makes no difference if there is no watchman.

Merchandising. He shamelessly sells merchandise in a way that smacks of a Byzantine bazaar, everything from a Sharpie pen ($3) to a Bible ($60) and more. Past presidents have made millions writing and selling books, but McGehee said it seems unprecedented how brazen Trump is by hawking his wares while still in office. “I can’t think of another president who had this dynamic,” she said. 

Crypto. The pick of the litter in Trump’s merchandising is his venture into cryptocurrency, the very financial product that he once condemned. An Emirates fund invested $2 billion in a Trump crypto firm. His family is involved in several crypto businesses, but sticking out is a Trump digital coin, a $TRUMP meme coin. The meme coin technically has no inherent value, but individuals are deeply invested. Investors were recently spurred to buy millions of dollars’ worth of the coin to earn an invitation to an “intimate, private dinner” with the president. The “intimate, private dinner” will be held next week at his Virginia golf club for the top 220 holders of the $TRUMP coin. Every day, Trump supporters have lost money as the coin’s value plummeted, but Trump, like a stockbroker, earns money every time coins are sold, bought, or traded. The Trump group has garnered hundreds of millions in fees and crypto sales so far, report The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell and Jeremy B. Merrill. To crib the title of Fred Schwed’s 1940, Wall Street classic, “Where are the customers’ yachts?” 

“A [president] who has almost 40 percent of his net worth in his crypto ventures points out Norman Eisen, past White House ethics czar and co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment in 2020. “At the same time as he is regulating the digital currency industry—and, for good measure, has substantial foreign government cash pouring into those ventures!” writes Eisen.

In his first term, Trump was criticized for putting up foreign visitors to the White House at his Washington hotel. There, they held events trying to win favor. What is going on now makes what happened in Trump 1.0 look like the petty corruption Donald Trump grew up with in Queens. As Eisen says, “It is the single most profound presidential conflict of the modern era.”

Sovereign Wealth Funds. Trump’s family and friends are awash in cash gushing from the desert. According to The Wall Street Journal, sovereign funds from the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia and Qatar “have committed more than $3.5 billion to a private-equity fund run by Trump’s son-in-law,” and that “state-backed funds from Qatar and the U.A.E. were major investors in a $6 billion fundraising round” for Elon Musk’s xAI. Sporting a groomsman’s gray tie, Musk sat behind Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the president spoke in Riyadh.

McGehee, the government-ethics expert, said Congress is the only check on a president with such a multitude of conflicts. The Supreme Court already granted presidents immunity for official acts. But Congress could probe Trump’s business deals—as Republicans did with President Joe Biden’s family—and at least bring the focus to how he is ripping us off, if not pass appropriate legislation.

But even as Republican lawmakers increasingly express discomfort with the GOP’s proverbial blind eye to the telescope, Trump told reporters that the plane was “just a gesture of good faith” by the Qataris, and there the matter lies. 

Rest assured, if the Democrats win the House in 2026, item one on the agenda will be the Qatari plane and the Emoluments Clause. 

Nevertheless, Republican lawmakers do not appear to be worried* (❓), and in any event, they do not want to risk a public confrontation with the president. (Republicans in Congress are "kool-aid cult" intoxicated and they cannot think for themselves.)

“So, he’s going to keep doing this until he can’t,” McGehee said, “and there is a hubris there that I think is beyond even just having a conflict. I think the American people are mistaken if they believe that just because you’re rich, you can’t be bought.” And just because you’re rich, you can still be sold.

By  James D. Zirin author and legal analyst, is a former federal prosecutor in New York’s Southern District. He also hosts the public television talk show and podcast Conversations with Jim Zirin.

*Maine Writer Post Script:  Republican's short term memory loss. Sarah Palin launched her political career when she listed Alaska's state paid for luxury jet for sale on eBay.  

Donald Trump is irresponsibly destroying America as we knew it but why is he jealous about John and Jackie Kennedy?

One would like to think that RFKjr, (Rober F. Kennedy Jr.) would raise objections about this cruelty towards his family's heritage.  Although RFKjr is an  one of the incompetents in Trump's circus cabinet, he is still a Kennedy, and should express pride in his uncle's legacy, as a former and martyred president.

Trump’s (cruel and insane❗) War on John and Jackie Kennedy.

(IMO Trump is jealous about their lingering 90 percent positive popularity, even today.)

From ripping up the lovely White House Rose Garden to redoing Air Force One and the Kennedy Center, it’s Mar-a-Lago gilt versus Camelot taste. By Margaret Carlson published in the Washington Monthly.

John Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy

Obviously, Donald Trump never promised us a Rose Garden. 

Nor did he warn us that in his first 100 days, he would rip up the storied Jacqueline Kennedy Garden outside the White House’s West Wing and pave much of it for dancing, making it a glorified patio like the Mar-a-Lago one where he holds court. Nor did he divulge his intentions to force himself on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He muted his obsession with painting over the robin's egg blue color scheme on Air Force One that the Kennedys had given the presidential plane, and that no commander-in-chief since has considered removing, what with its echoes of blue skies and Tiffany’s boxes.

The through line of Trump’s dark to-do list is blotting out the Camelot aesthetic of John and Jackie Kennedy, erasing the halcyon Jacqueline Kennedy years, when the then 31-year-old First Lady remade the White House long after it was due for a lift following the Depression and World War II. After such bleak days, First Ladies Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower concentrated on the country’s recovery. It took the young presidential spouse (née Bouvier) and mother of two to use her brief, shining moment to return the Executive Mansion to its former glory. She did it and won over the country.

The 47th president wants a White House with all the subtlety of a Russian oligarch’s yacht and a Qatari Sheikh’s palace. Gold tchotchkes abound, including two golden cherubs imported from Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s aesthetics may prove to be as unpopular as his tariff-happy taxation of everything from coffee to Camrys. There’s a gulf (of America) between the public's impression of Trump’s first term and Kennedy's. According to Gallup in 2023, 90 percent of those polled held a favorable impression of JFK. A scant 46 percent felt the same way towards the first Floridian president.

That’s a lot of ground to make up, and Trump’s left no myth untouched. Erasing Jackie’s magic touch—ordering a coat of robin's egg blue on Air Force One–was high on his to-do list ever since his first term. He told CBS he wanted a paint job that “looks more like America” and “isn’t a Jackie Kennedy color.” Trump came up with a Democratic blue so dark it looks black, and a Republican red so bright it dominates. For their part, Democrats wanted no paint job at all, and neither did the Air Force generals who would be paying for it. He yearned for his long-awaited Boeing to arrive.

Then there is Qatar❗Last Sunday, the Qataris came dangling a fully tricked-out luxury 747, the likes of which no president has seen, including the well-to-do Kennedys with their dump of a Boeing 707. The deal had two parts: The plane would first go to the Department of Defense and then to Trump’s presidential library when he finishes his second (or third?) term. Eric and Don Jr. could then squabble over it when they weren’t collecting billions on their own digital currency and the myriad other businesses they’d hustled across the globe when Dad was in the Oval.

There should be a law, and there is. The Constitution strictly prohibits foreign gifts. But that’s never stopped Trump before who said he’d be “stupid” not to accept the Qatari plane, and so would the U.S. Treasury. “The maintenance we spend on those old planes, you wouldn’t even believe it.” That’s the Donald, always thinking of others, but not with his brain, if he believes a Middle Eastern sultan is spending $400 million for nothing in return.

The attached strings are hanging from every overhead bin. If this were Trump’s twist on the Harrison Ford movie, Air Force One, the president would be midair when the call came in advising him that the aircraft was under Qatari control with a course set for a NATO member with an extradition treaty if he didn’t do exactly as told. Trump actually walked onstage at the 2016 Republican convention to “The Parachutes,” part of the 1997 film’s soundtrack. Life doesn’t imitate art. It cuts and pastes it.

But, alas, Trump may not be getting a shiny new plane under the Christmas tree, after all, just a stocking with three pencils and two dolls. 😜A little due diligence and it turns out the Qataris were trying to dump this plane for years, lowering the price but finding no takers until they found a mark in the author of The Art of the Deal. The 747-8 was illiquid, and its decor appealed to a very small audience of other Qataris and the Donald. Even Middle Eastern oligarchs find millions of dollars in repairs, maintenance, and storage painful. This is why they were happy to unload it and insisted all gifts are final. There would be no returning the plane at the end of Trump’s second term (or third!). It would go to his presidential library and then, perhaps, to the Trump kids to squabble over who would keep it operable. Who’s the “stupid” one now❓

It was audacity, not fortune, when the 47th president pulled off a hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center this winter. Trump mowed down half its board, replacing them with MAGA loyalists, and its head, Deborah Rutter, with Richard Grenell, the director not of plays but of national intelligence, in his first term. 

Trump booted the Kennedy Center’s chair, the noted philanthropist and private equity mogul David Rubinstein, and installed himself. Almost immediately, Lin-Manuel Miranda canceled Hamilton's scheduled performance. To that, Trump huffed, so what, he didn’t like the first Treasury Secretary anyway, even if he was the founder of the New York Post, in 1801.

Maybe “My Shot” and “You’ll Be Back” isn’t the vibe of a septuagenarian whose taste runs to Cats, with its three full-blown renditions of his beloved “Memories.” 

Fortunately, another favorite, Les Misérables, was on the calendar before the hostilities. But in the time it takes to get a drink at intermission, ten members of the Les Miz cast went rogue. Hamilton, he could let pass, but fewer voices belting out “Do You Hear the Voices Sing?” Never! In a statement, Trump lamented the partisan politics; he just wants his Kennedy Center to be “a place where people of all political stripes sit next to each other and never ask who someone voted for.” Except at board meetings.

Trump has taken over a nationally beloved citadel he never set foot in during his first term, after several of the artists being honored criticized him. Chairing his first board meeting, he proposed that as a “king of ratings,” he should start emceeing the Honors because “every network will start bidding on it, going crazy.” Maybe, but CBS’s broadcast already wins the ratings as it is. Since his second coming, the Washington Post cites a 50 percent drop in ticket sales.

Never mind that. On opening night next month, June 11, Trump will debut as chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which could be the Donald J. Trump Center by then. A box seat costs only $2 million, not that much if you consider it includes a VIP reception.

Occasionally, Trump has to go home to eat, pray, sleep, and love—three of those anyway, maybe only two—in a house that Jackie restored to its historically correct state and incidentally invades Trump’s workspace. She traced the Resolute Desk, a gift from Queen Victoria made from wood salvaged from one of Her Majesty’s ships, to a storage room in the basement, refinished it, and installed it in the Oval Office, where Trump signs Executive Orders of dubious legality. Jackie’s prime time tour of the White House, broadcast on two networks and syndicated to 50 countries, was watched by 56 million people.

As every president does, Trump gets to add some personal touches to his surroundings: choose which of the Founding Fathers' wigged heads will hang in the Oval Office, the design of the carpet, the material of the drapes, and the placement of family photos. 

But Trumps' gone wild, encrusting anything that doesn’t move with gold lamé, on the fireplace mantel, the ceiling, the Rococo mirrors, gold frames around the portraits (he bumped Obama’s to make room for his), and gold eagles nesting on side tables. There were so many yellow objets behind the president as he called President Voldomyr Zelensky a big loser, it wasn’t farfetched to assume one of them was a trophy Trump collected for being a big winner.

The Oval Office weighed down with metal, Trump moved out of doors to finish Melania’s stripmining of the Rose Garden, which the Kennedys had installed. The main objective was upgrading its slow-draining irrigation system, but Jackie’s crabapple trees somehow disappeared to an undisclosed location in the process. Michael Beschloss, the historian, called Melania’s landscaping an “evisceration” that erased “decades of American history.” He suspected one reason was to clear a better camera angle for her speech at the Republican convention held there due to COVID in 2020.

She fired back that he’d misjudged her landscaping: “His misleading information is dishonorable & he should never be trusted as a professional historian."

Starting any day now, Trump will finish the job unless a curator stops him, ripping out the manicured space to pave it over for a terrace (so womens’ Jimmy Choo stilettos won’t sink in the soft ground), adjoining a ballroom he intends to build (like Mar a Lago’s) so that after dinner he can curl his fingers into a ball and fist dance the night away to “YMCA,” once a gay anthem and now a MAGA hymn.

Melania isn't around enough to help Trump’s crusade, only 14 days in the last four months, and her jacket back in the first term was a warning that “she really doesn’t care.” The former model is reclusive, largely emerging to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars for speaking and showing up. She’ll get a cut of the $40 million documentary about her life produced by Bruce Ratner and streamed by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon. Inside the White House, she was not keen on her official duties. 

While Jackie formalized Christmas at the White House with a “Nutcracker” theme her first year and a “Children’s Tree” her second, complete with tours, in 2018, Melania featured 40 blood red trees flanking each side of a hall, spooking the children. A viral meme of white Handmaid’s Tale hats atop the trees spooked the parents, and no tours. About the criticism she should have expected, and may have welcomed, she told her long-time friend and a manager of the 2017, inaugural, who by then was taping her, “What the f**k do I care about Christmas decorations?”

The worst thing Trump could do to the Kennedy legacy was give an outlet to a member of the troubled second generation beset by drugs, alcohol, divorces, and suicides. Over a thousand new cases of measles this month, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr is still saying from his position of authority, “There are problems with the vaccines.” At Congressional hearings last week, the 71-year-old wouldn’t give a straight answer to a repeated question about whether he’d vaccinate his own children. After a few more grillings like this, he won’t have the credibility to reduce the additives in Cocoa Puffs.

Kennedy isn’t the worst Trump appointee, but the worst Kennedy ever appointed to a post of such urgency. When the opponent of Vax Americana goes dancing on what was once his aunt’s Rose Garden, and watches Kennedy Center board member Lee Greenwood crooning “Proud to Be an American” at the arts center named for his slain uncle, we will have achieved full Trump. The saving grace is that Jackie, who would be 96 this summer, didn’t live to see it.

Margaret Carlson is a Washington Monthly contributing writer.