Qatar Gives Biggest, Bestest Plane To Biggest, Bestest Boy Donald Trump

The Qatari bribe plane is a personal gift, no matter what the White House tells you.

Source: Redlegsfan21 on Flickr via Wikipedia Creative Commons license

First, let us start by calling this giant luxury plane that Qatar is gifting Donald Trump what it is: a bribe.

Bribe bribe bribe bribe bribe bribe bribe bribe bribe bribe bribe bribe BRIBE.

There is no ambiguity here. None. A foreign government is handing an individual a $400 million gift. If Trump was leaving it for the next president, maybe it could be justified. But he’s reportedly not doing that.

Late on Sunday, Trump took to his vanity social media site to complain about the public outcry:

It’s a gift to the Defense Department! Sure, Trump will be the one using it for the next three and a half years (sigh) and then take it with him when he leaves office, forcing the next president to use a different plane because he’ll be using this one to travel to his various golf clubs. But that’s better than never having the plane for Trump’s use while he’s president at all, right?

Trump has been desperately thirsty for a new Air Force One since his first term, to the point that in 2019 he personally intervened to change the color scheme on two new planes being built by Boeing for presidential use. So if the nation of Qatar is going to offer him a new plane for free, one that press reports describe as “a palace in the sky” with a luxury interior befitting an Arab sheikh, Trump is going to jump on that deal like it’s a bucket full of Big Macs.

We do not need to be shy about this. Qatar gifts the plane, the United States Treasury doles out tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to upgrade it with all the communications and security features that are required for a presidential aircraft, and then Trump gets to take it with him when his term mercifully expires in 2029. What else to call it?

Saying that the plane is going first to the Air Force and then to Trump's “presidential library foundation” is a fig leaf. Even assuming there actually is a Trump presidential library in the future, the idea that the Trump family is going to permanently park a luxury 747 outside it, much like the old Air Force One from the 1970s and 80s is parked at Ronald Reagan’s library, is laughable.

No, this is a bribe. We do not need to follow the lead of The New York Times and say that this whole transaction raises “substantial ethical issues.” That’s like saying that losing your home in a fire raises substantial housing issues, or a nuclear bomb detonation raises substantial radiation issues.

Nor do we need to quibble about the definition of a quid pro quo. What kind of a fucking idiot is buying the argument that it’s not? Well, the kind of fucking idiot who writes for the Times, apparently:

Let’s put it this way with regard to the Times: even Trump remora Laura Loomer thinks accepting this plane as a gift is a terrible idea. Granted, Loomer's objections are more for her usual bigoted reasons and not ethical concerns about bribery of public officials. But considering her usual sycophancy, that even she thinks this is a bad look seems notable:

How and why is this happening? Well, the government really does need a new Air Force One. The two Boeing 747s currently in use for presidential travel (the Air Force One designation goes to whatever aircraft the president is on at a given moment) are both over 30 years old and require a lot of time-consuming and costly maintenance. Boeing is building two replacements that are to be delivered in 2027. But they are already well over budget and years behind schedule, so no one will be surprised if that date slips. The Biden administration even considered canceling the Boeing contract but ultimately kept it in place.

You might ask yourself, where in the hell are the government’s lawyers on this? The answer is that the White House counsel’s office and Attorney General Pam “The Scam” Bondi’s legal analysis are that the whole deal does not violate the Constitution’s emoluments clause because the plane is not being gifted to Trump in exchange for a specific act. It’s the same dumb argument being accepted by Eric Lipton: the deal is all quid, no quo.

Pam Bondi, in addition to being a venal idiot, was at one time being paid $115,000 a month to work as a lobbyist on behalf of the Qatari government, which just adds one more layer of sleaze to the whole thing.

So sure, Qatar doesn’t want anything in return. And Saudi Arabia gave $2 billion to the investment fund started by Trump’s string bean of a son-in-law, Jared Kushner, because it has such a generous heart.

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For its part, the administration has been desperately spinning reporters and propagandists alike. From Axios:

The U.S. and Qatar were bargaining over the price for a "palace in the sky" Boeing 747-8 to be used as the new Air Force One — and Qatar "came back and said: 'We'll just gift it. It's OK,'" a top administration source tells Axios.

"And it's gifted to the people of the United States, gifted to the Department of Defense," the source added.

Is the Department of Defense going to let all the people of the United States use the luxury 747? Can we reserve it for our personal use, kind of like people do with UberJets? Maybe let the youth rent it out for bachelor parties? After all, party buses can get stuck in traffic.

The Axios source also tried to claim that nobody is actually happy about having to take this deal because Boeing is so far behind on its delivery of a new Air Force One, saying that this “isn’t Donald Trump being a diva.” Which maybe we could believe if we just woke up from a 50-year coma and had never heard of Donald Trump.

And press windbag Karoline Leavitt swore up and down to Brian Kilmeade on Monday morning that no, no, Donald Trump is just a spirited public servant, no one has ever seen a public servant so spirited, he’s spiriting very strongly:

For his part, Trump seems to be getting a little testy about the whole thing. At an Oval Office event on Monday morning, he got mad at an ABC News reporter for asking about the jet, saying “They’re giving us a free jet” in the same voice we used to use to say to our mom, “But this Atari 2600 game is only fifteen dollars!”

Qatar told the Associated Press that the details are still being negotiated. So maybe this whole deal still falls apart. In that case, Trump will be very sad. Which is even more reason to cheer it on.

[NYT / Axios / AP]

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