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From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.
President Donald Trump is in the Middle East on the first major international trip of his second term.
And at the same time, a firestorm has erupted over his plan to accept a $400 million luxury airplane from the Qatari government.
Today my colleague Maggie Haberman explains why, to many people, this free plane is problematic.
And it's not just because of the precedent it sets but also what Qatar might expect in return.
It's Wednesday, May 14.
Donald Trump is set to accept a very pricey gift from the Royal Family of Qatar taking delivery of a Boeing 747 that will be used as Air Force One during his second term.
President Trump says the US government is poised to accept an airplane from Qatar, valued at nearly $400 million.
A super luxury Boeing jumbo jet from the Royal Family of Qatar.
The very lavish gift is raising substantial ethical and legal questions.
Maggie, I have been seeing all of these stories, having to do something with a plane and President Trump and Qatar, and can you just tell us what is going on?
Sure. So first of all, thanks for having me.
Rachel, it's great to be here.
It is great to be here with you.
What's going on here is that President Trump plans, and it's been very clear that he plans to accept a plane that he, he indicated is going to be donated by the Qataris for him to fly around on as a new air force one.
And this is a luxury plane worth about $400 million decked out on the interiors, used by the Royal family in Qatar.
And it has caused an enormous amount of outrage.
This is not just naked corruption.
It is also a grave national security threat.
Explain that outrage a little bit.
What's the reaction been?
So Democrats have been very vocal that they think this is essentially some form of a payoff to the president.
And what people will now see is the most powerful man on Earth flying around in a plane paid for by a foreign government.
We can't have our president or anyone else being influenced by foreign government gifts.
It's disgusting. And it's outrageous and unacceptable.
It's wildly corrupt.
Because as the editorial page of the New York Post said it's hard to imagine that officials in Qatar think that they are doing this Just to be nice and write it's hard to know what exactly they might want in return I imagined the government of Qatar would expect a return on this investment in the president of the United States So this is ridiculous to think that he can take this Most Republican elected officials have been pretty muted.
There've been a few who have commented Well more time concern is the safety of the president I mean, Qatar's not, in my opinion, a great ally.
I mean, they support Hamas.
It's worth the investment here in this country to build a big, beautiful country here in the United States.
But really, there has been a pretty strong reaction from some conservative Republican MAGA influencers, whatever bucket you want to put them in, who are normally pretty aligned with President Trump and who have said that this is not exactly draining the swamp as he said he would.
Taking sacks of goodies from people who support Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Jazeera, all the rest. That's not America First. Like please define America First in a way that says you take you should take sacks of cash from the Qatari royals." Basically the people that are really concerned about this are worried that it's like a flying bribe or something.
Yeah, exactly. A flying bribe is precisely how I think they would put it even though I know that the the White House would say that that is not what it is.
And President Trump got very angry at the suggestion that there could be an appearance of impropriety about this.
He also said, Rachel, that he won't continue flying on it when he leaves office.
And just to be clear, if this is a straight up gift from a foreign state, is that prohibited by any rules?
It's a great question.
A straight up gift to an elected official by a foreign government is generally not allowed and needs to be approved by Congress.
The way in which this might work sounds like it would be as a donation to the Defense Department, which is not totally unheard of, although certainly not under this kind of circumstance.
And then it would be donated in some way or turned over in some way to President Trump's presidential library right before he leaves office.
But it is going to raise all kinds of questions.
I, unlike you, Maggie, do not know much about Air Force One.
In a normal world, how does a plane become an Air Force One plane?
In a normal world, and for a while in this world, a new Air Force One is commissioned by the presidential administration by a major airplane maker, it's been Boeing.
And there is a contract that is active with Boeing for two new Air Force Ones.
And these planes are commissioned specifically for this purpose.
They get built out for this purpose, and they get fitted with certain systems that only exist for this purpose.
OK, but if we already have an Air Force One, why is President Trump even entertaining the idea of getting a new Air Force One?
So the back story here is that Donald Trump, for starters, is very obsessed with airplanes and obsessed with the way things look.
This Boeing 757 is a sleek, narrow bodied, long -legged beauty, and she's treated like the celebrity who owns her.
This is Donald Trump's private jet.
A Boeing 757. and obsessed with airplanes as a status symbol.
That's the big thing for him.
One of the things very important to me on the Boeing 757 was the Rolls -Royce engines.
They're special. He has owned planes of his own.
Planes outfitted with a full bar, entertainment system, iPod docking system, and how can we forget 24 karat gold trimming.
President Trump is flying around on two more than 30 years old, I think almost 40 year old, Air Force Ones that were commissioned from Boeing a very long time ago.
You know, when I first came in, I said, how old is Air Force One?
They are not in great shape.
So, Air Force One is a very old plane.
It's beautiful, but it's an old 747.
They're pretty janky.
But it's 30 years. Can you believe it?
So I said, so what's going on?
Well, the interiors are not especially nice.
But no administration, Obama, Bush, they didn't want to do it because it sounds luxury.
But at some point you gotta buy a plane for the country and these I mean, they're certainly nicer than a commercial airplane But they're not you know What you might see on say a Qatari luxury jet and these Arab countries would have their beautiful 747 800s 900s pour in and they were gorgeous and believe it or not.
I'm picturing like ripped cushions There's no there's no ripped cushions But there it looks like you were getting into I'm trying to think how to describe this if you were getting into like What was a really nice leather interior in the nineteen nineties?
Ah, and I'm good at airplanes Okay It looks like it is it looks that's a great word and the planes themselves are Enormous and they have a lot of fuel on them.
So they shudder when they take off And it's wonderful especially for those of us afraid of flying and they they really like heave to get into the air And this is always irritated Trump that this is sort of a bit of a janky plane that or two planes that need constant servicing and are old, and are not sleek and streamlined.
And so Trump renegotiated existing contracts that President Obama had signed, actually, when President Trump was in office the first time for two new Air Force Ones that were being commissioned by Boeing.
And Boeing, which is making them, has obviously had all kinds of struggles.
And here we are now where the planes are very delayed and they are, as of now, still not likely to be ready while President Trump is in office, which is very irritating to him, he has been very frustrated that he would not get to fly on the Air Force one that he renegotiated contracts for last time, he wanted to fly around in these new plants.
And so he has been looking at ways including asking Elon Musk to help him get something done faster, where he could have a new Air Force One in the next year and a half, possibly even by the end of the year.
And that is how this Qatari plane was turned to as an option.
Why the Qataris, why this plane, why from them?
So Trump toured this plane in February when it was parked at the Palm Beach International Airport and he clearly really liked it.
This is a plane, the Qatari plane, that has very lavish interiors so it's really not going to require a lot of work there.
It would obviously need some kind of equipment upgrades and it would need to be militarized.
And there are some security concerns here about having a Qatari plane and whether there would be any kind of a bugging or spying or so forth.
I know that that's a concern that a lot of officials have raised, but at the end of the day, it is a much prettier plane than the ones he's flying on right now.
And that's why we're here.
I want to break down a little bit what you said about the things that need to happen to the Qatari planes in order for them to become Air Force One planes.
So like the militarization of the planes, what does that mean?
So Air Force One has to be able to survive a nuclear blast. It has to be able to evade certain missiles that are shot at it.
It has to operate as a traveling command center for a president wartime.
Don't forget President George W.
Bush was famously in the air, basically as a mobile White House after 9 -11 and that is where he was monitoring the aftermath of the attacks and he was issuing directives.
So, Air Force One has to be equipped to do all kinds of things, and it has to have certain secure communication systems, and the hope would be to have it done by the end of the year.
Is that realistic? A lot of defense experts have told us not really.
That is what they have been looking at.
And it seems, as of now, as if they are going to move forward. We'll be right back.
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So Maggie, this proposed gift for this plane, what do we know about the terms?
Very little. It's all notional right now because the administration has not released whatever legal analysis that they say they have done.
But what we know of and what we're told is that Attorney General Pam Bondi, who we should note was a lobbyist for Qatar prior to becoming the attorney general.
But putting that aside, she and the White House counsel, David Warrington, decided that it was legally permissible for the Defense Department to get this donated plane and then for that plane to be turned over to the Trump Library just before he leaves office.
The model that has been cited to us is the donation to the Reagan presidential library of the 707 plane that President Reagan flew around in when it was retired and decommissioned.
OK, so the idea here being that like, the Qataris would not be donating it to him, they would be donating it to the Department of Defense.
And then after Trump leaves office, the plane doesn't go to him, it goes to his library.
So it's still not going to him and therefore it's more kosher.
That's is that the idea?
That's the idea. I mean, it seems as if based on what we've been told by the administration, they are taking two separate concepts.
One is that it is permissible in the past to donate an aircraft to the Department of defense.
And then separately, the Reagan Library had this retired plane that President Reagan had flown around on.
That plane is on display at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.
I've toured it. It's hard to imagine that President Trump would not like to hang on to this plane for personal use himself.
It's much nicer than his own.
He said on Monday that he is not going to keep flying around in it.
But I know that most people who have some visibility into this process are a bit skeptical of that.
Okay. Whether or not he actually keeps this plane for his personal use, what it seems like is that the sitting president of the U .S. just got or will get or is negotiating to get a 400 million dollar plane for free, a plan that the U .S. would otherwise be paying a United States company to manufacture and retrofit.
And it just seems like it's hard to think of this as anything other than a gift, even if they've technically donated it to the Department of Defense?
Look, this doesn't match any kind of Department of Defense donation that I'm aware of in the past. I am willing to be shown wrong, but I don't know of that.
The military would have to retrofit any plane that it acquired that was not built from scratch as an Air Force One.
But the bigger issue is, again, that this is the royal family of a country that I just I just want to also point out that Trump accused of sponsoring terrorism at the highest levels, those were his words, in 2017 and encouraged a blockade of, and that blockade ended in 2021 just as he was leaving office, but now it is acceptable for him in his mind to accept this donation.
I don't know what this ends up legally looking like.
I do know that if President Biden had done the same thing, the outrage from Republicans would have been as loud as the outrage from Democrats is now.
Do we have any idea what might be in it for the Qataris to do this?
That's the question.
I mean, we don't know.
The president said something, it was almost as if he's thinking of this as some kind of a return on investment, which was, you know, we provide security for them.
I don't think there's a mutual defense treaty, but there is a very large U .S. military base in Qatar, and there has been a strategic alliance.
Okay, there shouldn't be too many questions.
It's been covered pretty well.
— but that was the question he was asked by the ABC News reporter on Monday.
— Has Qatar asked for anything in exchange for that $400 million luxury jumbo jet?
And how can the American people be so sure that they will not in the future?
— She asked him, you know, can you assure the American people that Qatar is not looking for something in return?
— And I think Qatar, who has really—we've helped them a lot over the years, in terms of security and safety.
I feel that. You didn't really answer it other than just saying, you know, they want to do this I think that was a very nice gesture.
Now. I could be a stupid person to say oh no We don't want a free plane.
We give free and that somebody would be quote -unquote stupid to turn down such a free gift Have you ever been given a gift worth millions of dollars and it not receive that not a gift to me it's a gift to the Department of Defense.
And you should know better because you've been embarrassed enough and so has your net worth." What Qatar could want in exchange, I don't know.
But I know that that question is going to come up a lot if this gift goes through.
I understand that we don't actually know what they want now or maybe would want in the future.
But could you just, Maggie, tick through the relationships between Trump World and Qatar?
You mentioned Pam Bondi.
What else do we know?
It's a good question.
And look, there is a very long history of US officials, not just in the Trump administration, lobbying on behalf of Mideast countries.
There are however a lot of Qatari connections.
So Jared Kushner, President Trump's son -in -law, who's not in the administration now, but whose work in the past administration was beneficial to him in private business, runs an investment fund that has Saudi investments and also has Qatari investments.
And that's one connection.
And Steve Whitcoff, Trump's special envoy who works a lot in the Mid East, is a private businessman with work involving Qataris.
The Trump company is building a golf course, I believe, in Qatar.
So there are a lot of entanglements.
There's no question.
Maggie, as you almost certainly know, Trump is currently in the Middle East on I think this is his first major trip since coming back into the White House for a second term.
One of the stops that he's on is to Qatar.
And it's notable where he's not going, which is Israel, despite the fact that the biggest conflict in the Middle East is in Gaza, obviously, between Hamas and Israel.
What do we make of this?
So it's not surprising that he's going to Qatar.
It is a country where the U .S. had been seen as an ally prior, frankly, to Trump's comments in 2017 about Qatari sponsoring terrorism.
them. But the broader message of this entire enterprise that he's engaging in this week, to your question, Rachel, is there's no clear foreign policy aim for the US, it's deals.
Deals, deals, deals, deals.
Yes, look, when he went to Saudi Arabia in 2017, the goal was to try to minimize extremism in the region.
That was the stated purpose.
This purpose is deals, and it's stated as deals for the US.
But is there an overlap now and a lot of you know, crosscurrents between deals for the US and deals that could be beneficial to the president, clearly.
So the deals, deals, deals that deal making what kind of deals and with whom what are we talking about?
So there's purported investment coming from Saudi Arabia.
I believe that he is looking for similar investment declarations from other countries.
And then there are corporate leaders who all have shown up at this Saudi investment forum, Some of whom have been Trump donors, like Elon Musk.
Then there are people who Trump has spoken to frequently over the years, Steve Schwartzman, chief executive of the Blackstone group.
Larry Fink from BlackRock is there.
Sam Altman, the chief executive of Open AI.
The head of Palantir, there is the head of Halliburton, the president of FIFA, the head of Boeing is there as we're talking about Boeing in these airplanes.
The head of Boeing is there?
Yeah. Is that awkward?
Well, I'm not sure what their side conversations were, but certainly the backdrop of the conversation is interesting.
And one thing just to remember Rachel about the Qatari plane, the initial report was that this plane was going to be gifted to him or announced as a gift to him while he's in Qatari this week.
The Qatari officials after that report said that that was incorrect and the discussions around Trump obtaining this plane were still ongoing.
things. So I got the sense just from that statement that Qatar officials don't want the headline out of this week to be, we're giving you a big gift and here we are.
So taking all of this together, the plain deal with Qatar, the trip with all these business leaders with no clear diplomatic purpose, I can see why it all feels a little unclear as to what President Trump's primary goal is here.
So there's no question that there are some real deals for the country that Trump is looking to achieve here, whether it's artificial intelligence or nuclear power, these are still important exercises for him as a president that could be beneficial to the US.
It is unavoidable to note that all of these discussions are in a region that is increasingly significant to the Trump family's own business interests.
And presidents are not subject to ethics rules the way staff are.
But presidents, and they don't all succeed at this obviously, but generally speaking, the standard that presidents have been held to is to try to avoid appearances of conflicts of interest so that voters are not raising questions about who these presidents are working on behalf of.
Right. Because this is not a bad look, then what is a bad look?
Trump increasingly doesn't care.
He's making that very clear about negative headlines.
Jonathan Swan and I wrote a story during the transition about how the two guardrails on historically were the stock market and bad press coverage.
The stock market he's reacted somewhat to but negative press coverage hasn't exactly been much of a hindrance to him.
And he is angry that he is even being questioned about this.
And he is determined that he wants to get this plane regardless of the criticism he's receiving.
And so far we have seen he is willing to dig in and ride out the storm.
Maggie, it's been a pleasure.
Thank you so much. Rachel, thank you.
We'll be right back.
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Here's what else you need to know today.
On Tuesday, President Trump announced that he would end sanctions on Syria.
The move throws an economic lifeline to a country that, until December, had been devastated by years of civil war and dictatorship under the Assad family.
The sanctions were imposed more than a decade ago, in response to the Assad government's brutal crackdown on the country.
And they've been a stranglehold on Syria's economy ever since.
A majority of the population lives in crushing poverty.
The surprise announcement from President Trump came on day one of his trip to the Middle East. And he's expected to meet with the new president of Syria today, in Saudi Arabia.
Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon Johnson and Olivia Knatt.
It was edited by Chris Hacksill and Rachel Kuester, with help from Paige Cowitt.
It contains original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lizano, and was engineered by Chris Wood.
Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wunderli.
That's it for The Daily, I'm Rachel Abrams, see you tomorrow.
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