Trail Notes
MAGA minions trash Qatar jet gift / Trump's Saudi crown prince bromance / Qatar’s deep ties to Trump world / Trump is finally getting his military parade
The Plane! The Plane! Welcome to Fantasy White House
By now you’ve no doubt heard about what has been described as a “palace in the sky,” which is appropriate since it once belonged to the Qatar royal family.
Here’s the back story: The current Air Force One is feeling like our recent presidents, you know, too old for the job, and the Boeing Company is way behind on providing its replacement. So the good folks in Qatar offered a $400-million 747 to be retrofitted to fly the American president around the world. And, as a bonus, it would eventually belong to the Donald Trump Presidential Library (which currently is nothing more than a website), although Trump would apparently still be able to use it after he leaves the White House.
That arrangement seems to run counter to a specific sentence in the Constitution that forbids U.S. officials, including the president, from accepting gifts from foreign officials without congressional approval. But not to worry, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who once was a lobbyist for Qatar, gave her blessing to the arrangement.
Trump has made it clear that he thinks it would be “stupid” to turn down what he described as a ‘free” plane, even though it could cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make it suitable and safe for presidential travel. Trump even shared a story in which he claimed that legendary golfer Sam Snead once said that you should always accept an offer from another golfer that a putt is a “gimme.” Aside from the fact that Snead’s biographer, Al Barkow, contends the golfer never said such a thing, it’s quite the leap to compare a gift of an airplane from a foreign government to a putt—particularly when that government has been a longtime supporter of Hamas, an energy partner of Iran, and a landing place for exiled Taliban leaders.
But even MAGA stalwarts don’t think it’s a good idea. Big-name congressional Republicans, including Senate Leader John Thune and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, dared to disagree with their president. Besides them, the likes of one-time Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley posted on X, “If this was Biden, we’d be furious,” a sentiment echoed by MAGA podcaster Ben Shapiro, who conceded, “I think if we switched the names to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, we’d all be freaking out on the right.” Even the consummate Trump loyalist, conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who swears she would “take a bullet” for Trump, has serious misgivings. “We cannot accept a $400-million gift from jihadists in suits,” she lamented in a post on X.
Trump’s Saudi Arabia Sweet Spot
It was no coincidence that Donald Trump’s first foreign trip of his second term was to the Middle East, the sweet spot of his family business. While he insults Canada every chance he gets, Trump gushes over Saudi Arabia and its ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, aka MBS. That makes perfect sense, because for someone like Trump, MBS is living the dream. He has limitless wealth and he can do whatever he wants to whomever he wants. Back in 2018, you may recall, MBS ordered the murder of one of his critics, Jamal Khashoggi, who was a Washington Post columnist. He then had his body dismembered. U.S. intelligence agents confirmed it. But that was then. This week, Trump described MBS as a “great guy” and declared, “I like him a lot. I like him too much.”
With good reason. Saudi Arabia has been more than a little welcoming to the Trump Organization. Since Trump’s re-election, the company has announced the construction of two luxury apartment “Trump Tower” buildings in Riyadh and Jeddah. Its partner will be Dar Global, a London-based real estate developer that’s investing heavily in projects in Saudi Arabia. Last month, LIV Golf, the new golf league backed by the Saudi government, hosted a tournament at the Trump National Doral course in Florida. And then there’s the reported $2-billion investment by the sovereign wealth firm controlled by MBS to help launch the new private equity firm owned by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in 2021.
Qatar’s Deep Ties to Trump World
Trump finished off his overseas lovefest with stops in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Given the many connections key members of the Trump administration have to Qatar, the palace plane offer isn’t all that surprising. As mentioned above, Attorney General Bondi was a lobbyist for Qatar, for which her firm, Ballard Partners, was paid $115,000 a month; FBI Director Kash Patel worked as a consultant for the country; and the lobbying firm once headed by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles represented Qatar’s embassy in Washington, Then there’s Steve Witkoff, Trump’s real estate buddy and now his special envoy in the Middle East. Two years ago, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought out Witkoff’s struggling investment in New York’s Park Lane Hotel for $623 million.
As far as Trump business interests are concerned, Eric Trump last month reached a deal with Qatari Diar, a company owned by the government, and Dar Global to build “a luxury 18-hole golf course, golf club and an exclusive collection of Trump-branded luxury villas” in Qatar.
Trump’s final stop was in UAE. It’s doing its part to make the president and his sons happy by agreeing to have the state’s investment firm use the Trump family’s cryptocurrency to invest $2 billion in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. That outlay likely will earn the Trumps tens of millions of dollars.
Wow, Talk About Timing
According to documents obtained by Pro Publica, Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media on April 2. That was what Trump called “Liberation Day” when he imposed new tariffs that sent the stock market plummeting. Trump Media, which runs the Truth Social platform, dropped 13 percent in the days following Trump’s announcement before rebounding.
Musk’s War on Copyrights
The White House is claiming another victim in its government cleansing campaign: Shira Perlmutter, who headed the U.S. Copyright Office. No reason has been given, but there’s certainly been speculation. Turns out that Perlmutter’s office just released a big report on artificial intelligence that raises concerns about the use of copyrighted materials to train AI models. It also turns out that one person who seems to believe that intellectual property laws, including copyright, should be abolished, and that AI models should have access to just about everything is our old buddy Elon Musk, who, of course, has a new venture, xAI. There is no proof at this point that Musk was behind the firing, but he’s probably not the least bit upset that, as he likes to say, she’s gone into the wood chipper.
Would You Believe a $45-Million Parade?
The hope was that the president would forget about the whole military-parade-through-Washington, D.C. thing, that he’d get distracted talking about the word “groceries” or about wind turbines killing whales, and the whole notion would just fade away. But once it became known that June 14 is not only the U.S Army’s 250th anniversary and Flag Day, but also Donald Trump’s 79th birthday, all hope was lost.
Now planning is in high gear, and unlike during his first term when he could be convinced that a big parade would cost too much and do serious damage to D.C. streets, Trump isn’t about to change his mind. So there will be more than 150 military vehicles, 50 aircraft and 6,600 soldiers, who will need to be housed in unused floors of a General Services Administration building and a Department of Agriculture building. The cost? Anywhere from $25 million to $45 million, all at a time when the Veterans Administration is trying to cope with drastic budget cuts.
Randy Rieland is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.
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