President Donald Trump apparently has no idea what could possibly be concerning about accepting a $400 million gift of an Air Force One replacement from Qatar, the bankroller of Hamas who might look for a favor in the future in return.
“Why wouldn’t I accept a gift?” the perplexed president asked Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview that aired Tuesday night of the hugely controversial offer and the president’s delight at accepting it.
Trump also complained how “small” Air Force One looked next to the state jets parked nearby during his ongoing Middle East tour.
Air Force One, where Trump sat for his interview with Hannity on the way to Saudi Arabia, looked “much smaller” and “much less impressive” compared to the other aircraft, Trump complained.
“The plane that you are on right now is almost 40 years old,” Trump groused again.
“When you land and you see Saudi Arabia, and you see [United Arab Emirates], and you see Qatar, and you see all these — they have these brand new Boeing 747s mostly,” he swooned.
“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,” he declared.
The Qatari aircraft – so luxurious it reportedly has been called a “flying palace” – would be the most expensive gift ever given an American president. After Trump’s term ended, it would reportedly go to his presidential library – though the president insisted in a Truth Social post Tuesday that it would be given to the Department of Defense, not him.
Trump’s own Department of Justice lawyers have unsurprisingly determined it would break no laws to accept the Qatari gift.
Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres wrote to the Government Accountability Office on Sunday, blasting the deal as a "flying grift.”
He argued that it violates the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, which "explicitly prohibits any person holding public office from accepting ‘any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.'"
Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who specializes in government ethics, told NPR that if the plane goes to Trump's presidential library after he leaves office, "then it's not really a gift to the United States at all” and is a "pretty textbook case of a violation of the Emoluments Clause."
He also pointed out the troubling problem with gifts to a president, especially such an extravagant gift is that it leaves the recipient beholden to the gift giver.
Such gifts are “designed to create good feelings for the recipient and to get some kind of reciprocity," Briffault noted.
The kind of thing Trump “can give, of course, is public policy — weapons deals or whatever,” he added. It also becomes an ”incentive to other countries to give similar gifts as another way of influencing presidential decision-making,” said Briffault.
The bottom line is that it could take years and could cost American taxpayers “billions” of dollars to upgrade the Qatari plane to meet Air Force One specifications, including things like creating secure communications and electromagnetic shielding.
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