Trump flies Air Qatar

There are big doubts whether taking this "gift" is legal, but even if it is, it still stinks.

Give me the good ole’ days when America didn’t have its hand out.

Oh, wait, that was just last week.

The New York Sun summarizes why President Trump’s accepting the “palace in the sky” raises significant questions. Here’s the factual setting as best I can figure it: The President has arrived in Qatar as the monarchy makes ready to bestow what could be the largest gift ever given America. It’s a used — I employ that word advisedly — $400 million Boeing 747-8 jumbo jetliner being fitted out for a king (or in this case, an emir). Qatar will then give it to the United States (not Trump personally, as some of the NeverTrump press first erroneously reported) for the President to use as Air Force One. When Trump leaves office, the aircraft would go to the Trump library for Trump’s post-presidential use, although he has said he won’t actually use it.

When I first heard about this, it just seemed all wrong, although I couldn’t put my finger on why. The Sun, however, bails me out:

To us the report…is shocking, even if Boeing is way past due in replacing the presidential plane. The [New York] Times quotes a government official as saying that the scheme “has been signed off on by government lawyers who concluded it does not violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution and that the Defense Department can accept the gift.”

For reasons briefly explained further down in this post, I think the “government lawyers” conclusion is open to considerable doubt (which is one, but hardly the only, problem with having an Attorney General who, though qualified in the conventional sense, was chosen mainly for personal loyalty).

Even if the lawyers are correct, the gift strikes us as an example of the principle that sometimes the scandal is not what is illegal but what is legal. We defended Mr. Trump in his first term when Democrats argued that the Constitution’s emoluments clause* — prohibiting the president from accepting gifts from foreign governments without permission of Congress — forbade his hotels from doing custom with foreign dignitaries.

That, though, was a question of conducting normal custom in an arms-length transaction at market prices. The idea of a state like Qatar, which is involved in our most sensitive negotiations in the Middle East, giving one of the world’s most luxurious aircraft to the Department of Defense to be transferred, as the president leaves office, to his private charity for his subsequent personal use, well, it just strains credulity, to put it politely.

Trump already has a number of achievements to his credit, but his personal behavior and repeated heedlessness of law do not create a record that needs any more problems with credulity.

We say that as a newspaper that has three times endorsed Mr. Trump over the Democratic candidates he faced for president. Apart from all the niceties about what is and isn’t legal, the gift under discussion can’t be seen without the political and wartime context. This is far from an idealistic gesture like, say, that of France when it gave America the Statue of Liberty. Qatar is one of the financiers of the war against Israel and against America.

And harbors Hamas, which is per se disqualifying.

The Qataris’ gift to America for onpassing to Mr. Trump’s charity when he leaves office arrives as the scope of Qatar’s spending is starting to come into focus. It comprises billions of dollars being siphoned into American institutions of higher education…

…including a number of those very institutions that Trump himself soundly believes have forfeited their “entitlement” — for what now seems like forever — to massive amounts of taxpayer money, despite their enormous wealth and despite their months if not years of coddling open anti-Semitism and sometimes violent or borderline-violent confrontations against Jewish students and faculty.

Would we have accepted a multi-million dollar gift from the German American Bund?

…Its sovereign wealth fund has invested at least hundreds of millions of dollars in a fund, Affinity Partners, being assembled by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

That would be the same Jared Kushner who was the prime White House mover in Trump’s earlier term behind the First Step Act, the most pro-criminal piece of federal legislation in decades. And this is hardly to mention what should not need mentioning, to wit, the grossly incestuous aroma Affinity Partners creates, even before Air Qatar.

But it gets worse:

Mr. Trump’s key negotiator on Ukraine and Iran is, in Steven Witkoff, another beneficiary of the generosity of Qatar. The Mideast nation’s Investment Authority in 2023 “dispatched $623 million as a leveraged buyout of Mr. Witkoff and his partners,” the Times reports, at a time when the developer and his partners were “in a jam.” The money was part of what the Times calls an “enormous flow of dollars” from the Mideast.

This is the same Steve Witkoff who only days ago waffled on the most important military and foreign policy question currently before us, to wit, whether Iran should be permitted to maintain any nuclear or uranium enrichment program (as I noted in my post here).

The President, with what has become his typical degree of circumspection, responded to the questions raised here with, “The Dems are World Class Losers!!!” And this may well be true, see, e.g. the recent USA Today article titled, “Democratic Party's favorability hits record lows in two polls after 2024 losses,” but it’s just a shallow evasion. The legal questions surrounding this gift are at the minimum troubling. This controversy just builds higher and higher the main problem with Trump, to wit, that he so often seems to neither know nor care about law — not an optimal state of affairs for an officer of the government whose foremost constitutional duty is that “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

I’m no expert on the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, but at least a passing explanation of it is introduced here, together with a summary of why the Qatar adventure is a raunchy idea:

It’s true that the Clause, by its terms, prohibits only the official himself or herself from receiving the gift. But here it’s clear that Trump is the intended beneficiary; it is effectively a gift to him personally. And as Commander in Chief of the Air Force, he would have the power to control how and when the plane is used for his benefit. Claiming this is not a gift to Trump based on who holds formal title to the plane ignores the reality of what’s happening.

If Donald Trump’s presidency has potential, why throw it away on something this stupid?

UPDATE: An observant reader notes:

Leaving aside any legal rules, how can accepting such a massive gift
NOT inhibit Trump’s capacity to diss Qatar if doing so is called for?
Unless the answer is that Trump is so unprincipled and norm free that
in fact he would NOT have second thoughts about punishing Qatar if
needed, regardless of any debt of courtesy or gratitude. But none of
his actions towards Qatar will be viewed as neutral at this point. It is amazing that no one in his circle is willing to naysay him. Rather than trying to tease out an interpretation of the emoluments clause that would allow this transaction, his advisors should realize that a fancy plane is not worth even the appearance of impropriety, especially in the current political environment.

Maybe there was no other way to get him a plane quickly. But it would
have been great if he took over something that was rather bare bones,
just to show a common man touch. But he thinks that his love of
luxury is precisely the common man touch.