Donald Trump made another crack about Air Force One on Friday, complaining about the plane’s age as he wrapped up his four-day tour of the Middle East.
The president’s trip has been overshaded by his decision to accept a $400m Boeing 747-8 jet gifted by Qatar’s royal family.
After walking a blue carpet along the tarmac at Abu Dhabi International Airport, Trump turned to reporters and complained: “I leave now and get into a 42-year-old Boeing. The new ones are coming, new ones are coming.”
He then walked up the stairway, delivered one of his trademark fist pumps and entered the cabin to begin the long return journey to Washington DC.
The remark follows a week of ethics complaints about the president’s acceptance of the “flying palace” presented to him by Qatar, which Trump hopes to use as a replacement for the current presidential plane, a model he believes is outmoded.
The president dismissed the unease surrounding the gesture by saying that only a “stupid person” would have rejected it.
“Why wouldn’t I accept a gift?” he asked Fox News host Sean Hannity incredulously during an interview conducted aboard Air Force One this week.
“The plane that you are on right now is almost 40 years old,” he griped, a claim he added another three years to in his comments on Friday.
"When you land and you see Saudi Arabia, and you see UAE, and you see Qatar and they have these brand new Boeing 747s mostly. And you see ours next to it, this is like a totally different plane. It’s much smaller. It’s much less impressive.
“We’re the United States of America – I believe we should have the most impressive plane.”
Trump’s own Department of Justice lawyers have meanwhile swiftly ruled that accepting the gift would break no laws.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House lawyer David Warrington said the donation of the aircraft would be “legally permissible” given that its ownership would be transferred to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation before the end of his term.
But Democratic New York Rep. Ritchie Torres, for one, has expressed outrage and written to the Government Accountability Office to blast the jet as a “flying grift,” arguing that it violates the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause.
Columbia Law School Professor Richard Briffault meanwhile told NPR that if Trump retains ownership of the plane after leaving office, in spite of his claim on Truth Social that it will ultimately be given to the Department of Defense, “then it’s not really a gift to the United States at all” and instead amounts to a “pretty textbook case of a violation of the emoluments clause.”
Professor Briffault further warned that accepting any present leaves the recipient beholden to the gift-giver, an argument also made by Trump nemesis Hillary Clinton, saying that gestures like Qatar’s are “designed to create good feelings for the recipient and to get some kind of reciprocity.”
Another cause of concern is the eye-watering cost of retrofitting the luxury jet to make it an acceptable substitute for the presidential plane.
Experts warn that it would take several years and require billions of dollars in further investment from the American taxpayer to ensure it meets the necessary standards to replace Air Force One.
It would require secure communications, electromagnetic shielding, and in-flight refueling capabilities, to name just three necessary upgrades.
A private contractor would, in all probability, have to rip the plane apart before it was fit for use, and aviation experts cited by NBC News have put the bill at $1bn, more than twice the plane’s worth.
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