Donald Trump and maga Republicans destroying America and as Americans we are fed up with his evil selfishness

Echo opinion letter published in the Milwaukee Journal, in Wisconsin: By any reasonable assessment, the first six months of Donald Trump’s presidency have been an abject failure❗💢

It bears remembering that Trump took office as a convicted felon, also being found liable for sexual assault. 

Trump pardoned over 1,500 of the January 6 rioters, many of whom assaulted law enforcement officers.

Trump boasted and bragged that he would end Russia's invasion of Ukraine in one day. Six months later the war rages on. Trump's ICE squad is literally kidnapping people off of America's streets, his agents of cruelty wearing masks and no identifying marks on their clothing or vehicles. They are locking people up with no due process.

Trump's unjust tariffs (taxes) are causing price increases at home and economic confusion around the world. The latest economic reports show slowing hiring, rising inflation and a loss of manufacturing jobs.

Trump and the Republicans' budget bill will take health insurance away from approximately 11 million people and SNAP (food assistance) from millions of hungry children. The closing of USAID will take food and medicine away from starving people overseas.

Trump's latest hustle is accepting a "gift," a strict violation of the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, in the form of a Boeing 747-8 airliner worth $400 million from the Qatari government. Trump intends to skim $934 million from the taxpayer funded Pentagon budget to retrofit the plane.

The corruption is staggering.

From James Korthals, Cedarburg, Wisconsin

Emoluments Clause is pseudonym for Grand Grift: Donald Trump violates the Constitution on a daily basis

The Sky-High Corruption of Donald Trump

Echo report published in The Nation by Chris Lehmann.

The Democrats missed their first chance to spotlight Trump’s repeated violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. They shouldn’t miss their second.

Back when outrage over Donald Trump’s blatant Oval Office corruption was still a novelty, a group of former national security officials filed an amicus brief in a 2019, lawsuit Democratic congressional leaders brought over Trump’s repeated violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. They cited one scenario as a clear and present threat to US national security interests: “A nation that plays a central role in the balance of power in the Middle East, one of the most fraught regions for U.S. national security in the world [could] curry favor with the President by purchasing real estate from one of his companies.”

Like much of the grim constitutional prophesying of that bygone era, this hypothetical illustration now looks laughably naive. 

Like much of the grim constitutional prophesying of that bygone era, this hypothetical illustration now looks laughably naive. 

Trump-branded real-estate conflicts in the Middle East still abound, of course—most notoriously via Trump’s son-in-law and erstwhile Middle East envoy Jared Kushner’s billion-dollar dealings with the Saudis. Yet Trump’s own newly announced deal with the Qatari royal family to deliver him a new Air Force One jet worth $400 million marks a breathtaking new level of presidential corruption. Indeed, the transaction, which has been hastily packaged as a “gift” from the Qatari government to the Pentagon, is a textbook illustration of the imperial corruption that the founders targeted in drafting the Emoluments Clause, which forbids the president from using his office for personal enrichment. Trump announced the deal on the eve of his first Middle East junket in his second term. The president’s visit to Qatar is bound to be steeped in superlative appreciations of his customized Boeing 747-8, which its original owners have quaintly dubbed “a palace in the sky.”

You can instantly gauge the depth of the self-dealing here by Trump’s overheated defense of the transaction. 

In an X post, the president announced, “The fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT (grand grift❗), FREE OF CHARGE of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist that we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. 

Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA.” Yet Trump’s own newly announced deal with the Qatari royal family to deliver him a new Air Force One jet worth $400 million marks a breathtaking new level of presidential corruption. Indeed, the transaction, which has been hastily packaged as a “gift” from the Qatari government to the Pentagon, is a textbook illustration of the imperial corruption that the founders targeted in drafting the Emoluments Clause, which forbids the president from using his office for personal enrichment. Trump announced the deal on the eve of his first Middle East junket in his second term. The president’s visit to Qatar is bound to be steeped in superlative appreciations of his customized Boeing 747-8, which its original owners have quaintly dubbed “a palace in the sky.”

Republican grand grift and Donald Trump's violation of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause

You can instantly gauge the depth of the self-dealing here by Trump’s overheated defense of the transaction. In an X post, the president announced, “The fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT (grand grift❗), FREE OF CHARGE of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist that we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA.”

This outburst showcases every element of the Trumpian defense of corruption, starting with the mind-bending assertion that insulating the presidency from foreign financial influence is somehow a “Crooked” political maneuver, as opposed to a central plank of constitutional governance. There’s also the ludicrous notion that the Qatari emolument is a savvy piece of deal-making, and not a quid-pro-quo arrangement to benefit the donor. The tell here is Trump’s adverbial stipulation that the deal is temporary; if it were such a self-evident boon to the country, shouldn’t it be permanent? 

In reality, of course, ownership of the airborne decadent palace will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation at the end of his term—the deal employs the federal government as a dummy corporation that’s hosting a pass-through arrangement to land the aircraft safely in Trump’s gilded empire of grand grift❗

The Qatari payoff also defies Trump’s bogus image as the heroic savior of American industry, as he’s gone out of his way to engineer a disastrous global trade war in order to preside over a “golden age” in US manufacturing. The American aerospace giant Boeing has an existing $5 billion contract to replace both Air Force One jets—a project that’s now five years behind its delivery date with reported company losses of more than $2.5 billion. 

$400 million 💲Donald Trump's BribeJet

Part of that overrun is due to the technical challenges of outfitting a plane with the basic security and communications safeguards required in a presidential aircraft—indeed, the economies Trump boasts he’s achieving in the Qatari “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE” will soon evaporate when the government will have to essentially disassemble and rebuild the craft to ensure that it operates free of foreign surveillance.

Beyond that, though, Boeing has become a purveyor of hazardous and performance-challenged aircraft thanks to a regime of financialized corporate governance that scorns basic engineering protocols and safeguards. 

In other words, Trump is scurrying to a foreign monarchy to meet his air travel demands because the American contractor originally charged with producing a pair of Air Force Ones has failed to meet its obligations under a Trumpian model of commerce that privileges stock buybacks over performance fundamentals. 

Small wonder, then, that Trump’s own tirade trails off into a phoned-in show of rancor: “Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA”

But, alas, Trump isn’t wrong to call out Democratic fecklessness. During Trump’s first term, Democratic congressional leaders failed to bring emoluments charges in their impeachment actions against the president. That’s why national security advisers were reduced to weighing in on a civil suit against Trump for his many emoluments violations, which ranged from trademark deals with China for the Trump Organization to the proposed use of his Doral golf compound for a G-7 meeting to his doubling of the Mar-a-Lago initiation fee to $200,000 shortly after his election. 

And the civil suit eventually ran aground once it reached the US Supreme Court, which predictably declared the issue moot after Trump completed his first term. (Indeed, the Trump-stacked right-wing court is itself a plain instance of executive branch corruption run amok, but that is a sermon for another occasion.)

The timorousness of Democratic leaders in the face of such blatant abuse of power failed to exploit a political opportunity. 

At the time, Trump was using the Oval Office to benefit himself on a scale unseen in the annals of presidential corruption—and exposing his fraudulent business practices would upend the chief basis of his demagogic appeal as a master dealmaker. 

Instead, Democrats first homed in on the effort to bribe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with a military aid package and then sought to impeach Trump for fomenting the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Both of those shameful criminal episodes were founded in Trump’s bedrock conviction that he’s an unparalleled gamer of the governing racket, and the effort to police them in Congress would have been greatly advanced by emoluments charges undercutting Trump’s phony standing as a maestro of the deal.

The same core dynamic holds true today—there’s nothing stopping Democrats from stressing the ways in which Trump’s corruption is integral to how he rules and to his transformation of the federal government into a transactional mob syndicate enforced by goons such as Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Kash Patel. 

Indeed, the impeachment resolution introduced last month by Michigan Democratic Representative Shri Thanedar includes an article on “bribery and corruption” that cites the Emoluments Clause. A Democratic Party serious about combating MAGA authoritarianism and graft could start by reversing its policy of treating Thanedar like a fringe pariah.

Instead, Congress’s functional silence on emoluments has further enabled the posture of MAGA impunity in Trump’s second term, which has, among other things, transformed January 6 into a model of right-wing governance. Congress’s dilatory treatment of Trumpian corruption is also why, for all Trump’s whining over the Qatar deal, Democratic responses somehow manage to be worse. “Nothing says ‘America First’ like Air Force One, brought to you by Qatar,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement on X. “It’s not just bribery, it’s premium foreign influence with legroom.” No, Chuck—nothing says “failing to do your job” like thinking you can combat executive-branch influence-peddling with some staffer’s pathetic idea of a social media zinger.

Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).

Donald Trump is accepting a BribeJet from Qatar. Grifter Trump

big shiny things

Report published in New York Magazine Intelligencer

by Jeff Wise

You’ll Pay for the Upgrades to Trump’s Luxury 747 From Qatar
The “new” Air Force One is a grift. (IOW, Swindling❗)

You’d think that no one needs a new jet less than Donald Trump, who already owns his own customized Boeing 757 and, as president, has free use of a pair of heavily modified 747 jumbo jets that collectively make up Air Force One.

But both of his current rides suffer significant disadvantages that Qatar’s “flying palace” 747 would overcome. Over the weekend, ABC News and others reported the country’s royal family is set to donate a jet to the U.S. Air Force in order to be upgraded to carry the president — then transfer its ownership to Trump’s presidential library when he leaves office.

Air Force One’s main drawback for Trump is that he can’t take the planes with him after the White House. Though ownership of what I’ll call the BribeJet will technically be transferred from the Qatari government to the U.S., the point of the transaction is clearly to benefit Trump personally, as he will have exclusive use of it for the rest of his life.

BribeJet’s advantage over Trump’s own aging 757, which he has dubbed “Trump Force One,” is that it is vastly more opulent. As I previously reported, the 757 is a venerable workhorse whose primary virtue is that it looks impressive to those who don’t know much about luxury jets. Originally built as an airliner in the early 1990s, it served as a workhorse for the now-defunct low-cost carriers Sterling Airlines in Denmark and TAESA Airlines in Mexico, where it likely racked up many thousands of hours of flight time. It was then purchased and converted to a private jet by Paul Allen before being sold to Trump.

Trump routinely misrepresented the plane’s value and luxuriousness in the media, claiming that it cost $100 million (used aircraft of that discontinued model would more likely fetch $5 to $8 million) and that it had “special” engines installed (it carried standard 757 ones). 

After Donald Trump took office in 2017 and began flying Air Force One, his 757 was left to languish at an airfield in upstate New York with one of its engines removed and the other wrapped in plastic. After he lost the 2020 election, Trump sent the plane for renovation in Texas and often used it as a backdrop during campaign rallies.

Qatar’s 747, in contrast, was built by Boeing specifically as a private jet for the royal family. It was one of two acquired in 2012, and added to Qatar Amiri Flight, a fleet of aircraft that the country’s government maintains for the use of its royal families. (In 2018, Qatar tried to sell the other one but then decided instead to give it to Turkey’s authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a move that prompted outrage from Turkish opposition politicians.

Used infrequently by the royal family, the BribeJet has so far only accumulated about 1,000 hours, meaning it was flown only two hours per week, on average. According to Bloomberg, its interior was outfitted in “creamy white and tan furnishings, rugs, and artwork,” by the fabled Parisian interior design firm of Cabinet Albert Pinto, which accented the décor with “custom-made Tai Ping rugs, sycamore, and wacapou wood fixtures, and artwork by Alexander Calder.” According to a prospectus circulated when the aircraft was put up for sale in 2020, it features a master bedroom and a guest bedroom tucked into the 747’s upper deck, each with its own en suite bathroom and shower. As with any custom decoration, the aircraft was outfitted to the particular tastes and needs of the then-owner, which may not match the tastes of subsequent buyers. Among the accessories listed in the prospectus is “oven goat,” whatever that is.

The Qatari 747 is significantly younger than the current iterations of Air Force One, both of which first flew in 1990. “It’s a more capable aircraft — greater range, better fuel efficiency, and a more modern flight deck,” says Ethan Dang, founder of the private-aircraft detailing company Onground Systems. The U.S. government has been planning to replace the aircraft with new models since 2018, at a cost of $3.9 billion, but work has been slowed by the fact that, due the extreme importance of the passengers it carries, everyone working on it has to have a special security clearance. 

Also, the airframes require heavy modifications. Among other things, Air Force One jets are outfitted with an anti-missile defense system, hardening against a nuclear strike, and the ability to refuel inflight. These modifications take time, and at this point the new jets aren’t expected to be delivered until 2029.

It’s not clear how many of these features the Air Force will add to the BribeJet, or what security clearance those working on it will need. In the past, the government has taken every imaginable precaution to ensure that Air Force One will perform flawlessly (that’s why there are two aircraft to fulfill a single role) and will be safe from foreign eavesdropping (which is why workers need high-level security clearance), but the Trump administration has been cavalier about such precautions, with numerous officials appointed without security vetting. Regardless of how much the administration decides to loosen the Air Force’s requirements for the plane, the work is expected to take long enough that Trump’s second term will nearly be over by the time it’s ready for use. Thus, all the taxpayer dollars that are being funneled into its renovation will mostly go toward its use by Trump as a private citizen, not as the president.