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Donald Trump is in talks to accept a $400 million gift from a foreign government. The president has become impatient as he awaits replacements for Air Force One—initially due from Boeing in 2024, they’re now expected in 2027—and ABC News reported yesterday that the small Persian Gulf country of Qatar, an American ally, intends to give him a plane.
The most astonishing thing is that Trump is doing this out in the open. One secret to his impunity thus far has been that rather than try to hide his misdeeds—that’s what amateurs such as Nixon and Harding did—he calculates that if he makes no pretense, he can get away with them. This worked when he called on foreign countries to interfere in U.S. elections, when he declined to divest from his companies in his first term, and when he tried to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Now he is daring the courts, Congress, and Americans to either stop him or else declare graft legal—at least for him.
Underscoring the crookedness, the plane would ultimately belong not to the U.S. government but to Trump: Once he leaves office, it would reportedly “be transferred to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation no later than Jan. 1, 2029, and any costs relating to its transfer will be paid for by the U.S. Air Force,” per ABC. In short, a foreign government might give the president of the United States a $400 million personal gift. Not a bad haul at a time when Trump is asking American children to do with fewer dolls and pencils. (Federal law allows officials to accept personal gifts below a certain amount, currently set at $480. That’s 0.0001 percent the estimated value of the plane.)
Just how final this deal is remains unclear—a Qatari government spokesperson said it is under consideration—but Trump confirmed the arrangement on Truth Social. “So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, 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 we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane,” he wrote.
Accepting an aircraft from a foreign country, even an ally, raises many questions about national security. Who can vouch for the safety of the plane? Who will inspect every inch of the plane to be sure it’s not bugged? (A standard 747 has 171 miles of wiring, according to Boeing.) That assumes the plane could be made operable at all—not a sure thing, as The Wall Street Journal reported in an earlier iteration of this story. All of this would be worrisome to the White House except that, as I’ve written, Trump does not care about national security. “Trump is the only thing he’s interested in,” former National Security Adviser John Bolton told me earlier this year.
If there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there’s certainly no such thing as a free plane. The Qataris would presumably not give Trump such a plane out of the goodness and generosity of their hearts. There’s a simple term for this: bribery. The fact that we don’t know what Qatar might want from Trump doesn’t change that. In fact, it’s arguably scarier, because rather than consider the exchange a quid pro quo for something specific, Trump could slant any number of policy choices to benefit Doha. The Supreme Court has, in a series of recent decisions, made prosecuting politicians for corruption harder and harder, but that doesn’t preclude the rest of us from using plain language.
In this case, there’s a specific term too: foreign emoluments. The Constitution is not a very long document, but it specifically forbids officeholders from taking gifts from foreign powers. Trump realized during his first term that the ban is all but unenforceable. He accepted many foreign emoluments—including in the form of business at his Washington, D.C., hotel—but a court rejected a lawsuit lodged by Democratic members of Congress, concluding they had no standing to sue. (The first Trump administration also failed to keep a proper log of gifts, and some were missing at the end of his time in office.)
The first Trump term was a festival of petty grift, but that was just a warm-up for the second term. In 2021, Trump described bitcoin as a “scam”; now, he’s decided to get in on the scam and has made, at least on paper, almost $1 billion from crypto projects, according to Bloomberg. The president is openly using his office to profit. In an auction that ended today, buyers of his personal cryptocoin can win a chance to tour the White House. As if that weren’t bad enough, the arrangement has also drawn bidders who believe that the winner’s access to Trump will provide a good chance to influence U.S. policy.
Ahead of Trump’s own Middle East jaunt this week, his family business has also struck billions in deals in the region recently; his sons have traveled to or announced agreements with Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and—whaddya know—Qatar. Perhaps it would have been too brazen even for Trump to have his son Eric’s Middle East trip come right after his. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a former top official in the first administration, is also reportedly serving as an informal adviser on Middle East diplomacy—despite his business interests in the region.
During his first presidential campaign, Trump presented his wealth as a guard against corruption. He couldn’t be bought off, he claimed, because he was independently wealthy; indeed, he boasted that he’d been the one doing the buying. Instead, his high personal net worth has only elevated his ambitions for corruption. Where a previous Republican president saw government of, for, and by the people, Trump sees the government as nothing more than the greatest opportunity for self-enrichment.
The courts may have effectively prevented prosecutors from policing official corruption, but if the U.S. Congress is willing to allow a foreign government to give the president a $400 million personal gift, what checks on his power remain? What’s the point of having a Constitution, or a Congress? The airplane may be free for Trump, but the cost to Americans could prove exceedingly steep.
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Evening Read
The Crisis of American Leadership Reaches an Empty Desert
By Lynsey Addario
Several months ago, I was reporting in Sudan with the photographer Lynsey Addario. She recently returned to the region and spent several days photographing and speaking with some of the people who are streaming into Tiné. According to aid workers on the ground, more than 30,000 people have arrived there since regional fighting intensified in mid-April, and more than 3,500 are now arriving every day. The photos below capture the desperation of people with nowhere to go, the absence of infrastructure to help them, the desolation of the empty desert.
— Anne Applebaum
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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