Qatar Bribes Trump With Bling Blimp

Can a plane be a presidential record?

This is banana republic shit.

There is no other way to describe the news, first reported by ABC, that President Trump is accepting a $400 million jet from the royal family of Qatar. In 2025, if you want to do business with the US government, you have to bribe the president. And bribe him they have! Trump’s eponymous company just signed a deal to build a luxury golf community in Qatar. That branding partnership includes a Saudi Arabian investment firm which inked a deal in December for two Trump branded projects in Riyadh. The timing was probably a coincidence, right?

The Trump Organization also has strong financial ties to LIV golf, the Saudi competitor to the PGA Tour.

This is naked corruption on a massive scale. But at least the golf stuff is covered by a tiny fig leaf, ostensibly separating the Trump organization and the Oval Office. Now, less than four months into his second term, Trump is ripping the bandaid off and discarding all pretense. After he admired the Qatari royal family’s 747, a plane so preposterously blinged out that it’s described as a “palace in the sky,” the country’s leaders generously agreed to donate it to America for the exclusive use of Donald Trump in perpetuity.

Under the terms of the deal, Qatar will “give” their plane to the Defense Department, which will undertake extensive renovations to turn it into the new Air Force One … at least temporarily. The national security implications of accepting a plane from a foreign sovereign for the US president to fly around in while discussing sensitive classified information is beyond the reach of this post. Suffice it to say: LOL. Under the “terms” of the conveyance, the plane will be given to the Trump presidential library foundation in January 2029, with the explicit caveat that it will be for Trump’s personal use. What the next president will ride around in is a problem for another day.

None of this is remotely legal. Under Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, AKA the Foreign Emoluments Clause, “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” The president is categorically barred from accepting so much as a used Volkswagen Jetta from the Qatari royal family, much less a jumbo jet.

ABC reports that Attorney General Pam Bondi “provided a legal memorandum addressed to the White House counsel's office last week after [White House Counsel David] Warrington asked her for advice on the legality of the Pentagon accepting such a donation.”

Both the White House and DOJ concluded that because the gift is not conditioned on any official act, it does not constitute bribery, the sources said. Bondi's legal analysis also says it does not run afoul of the Constitution's prohibition on foreign gifts because the plane is not being given to an individual, but rather to the United States Air Force and, eventually, to the presidential library foundation, the sources said.

Oh, well, that’s all fine then. And didn’t the Ronald Reagan library take possession of his presidential plane at the end of his term? Okay, yes, the Reagan library uses it as an exhibit for the public. But at some point Pam Bondi will dummy up a memo that says that it’s perfectly permissible for nonprofit foundations to supply luxury airliners to ferry private citizens around. Maybe they can even take tax deductible donations of fuel!

And who wouldn’t take the word of constitutional scholars Bondi and Warrington, both of whom were Donald Trump’s personal lawyers before joining the fed— OH WHO ARE WE KIDDING. Bondi was actually a registered lobbyist for the government of Qatar before she decided to ruin the Justice Department, which might give another lawyer ethical pause, but not our girl Pam!

Remember when Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of using the Clinton Foundation as a slush fund because she let Saudi Arabia donate bed nets to keep kids of dying from malaria? Or when Joe Biden’s “crime family” leaned on Ukraine to fire a corrupt prosecutor at the same time Hunter Biden was getting paid a few thousand dollars by a Ukrainian company? Amateurs!

None of this would be happening if the Supreme Court just did its damn job eight years ago. During the first Trump administration, Trump’s hotels, particularly the one in DC, became a magnet for foreign governments seeking to curry favor with the White House.

“Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’ Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’” one diplomat laughed to the Washington Post just weeks after the 2016 election.

Saudi Arabia headed up the frequent briber club, booking 500 nights at the Trump hotel in DC before Trump was even inaugurated. They used the rooms to host veterans flown in to lobby Congress against the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would have subjected Saudi Arabia to lawsuits from September 11 victims. Other foreign governments simply paid for blocks of rooms at Trump properties and never bothered to show up.

Payments from a “foreign State” to the sitting president plainly violate the Foreign Emoluments Clause, and Trump never sought a waiver from Congress. And so the Roberts Court did what it always does: It found a way to give Trump what he wanted while squandering as little of its own judicial credibility as possible.

The DC Circuit led the way in February of 2020, ruling in a case called Blumenthal v. Trump that members of Congress lacked standing to sue to vindicate their right to consent or withhold their blessing for the president’s bribery hotel. Competitors of the Trump hotel also sued, arguing that they lost business because foreign governments would rather consolidate their hospitality bookings and bribery payments into one check made out to the Trump Organization.

By contrast, the Second and Fourth Circuits permitted their cases to go forward, ruling that the plaintiffs had standing. But by the time those appeals reached the Supreme Court, it was fall of 2020, and the Trump presidency was about to end, at which point the lawsuits might arguably become moot. Trump’s Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall explicitly asked the Supreme Court to run out the clock and then vacate the lower courts’ decisions.

“Allowing the decision below to stand would be harmful not just to this President, but to the Presidency itself, given the legal rulings below that failed to accord that constitutionally unique office the deference it is due in opposing suits and seeking appellate relief,” he intoned somberly.

The Supreme Court agreed, granting certiorari, vacating the lower courts’ decisions, and remanding with instructions to dismiss the cases as moot, a process known as “GVR.” In so doing, the conservative justices effectively vaporized the Second and Fourth Circuits’ standing rulings, ensuring that they would never serve as precedent in future Emoluments Clause litigation.

Then in 2024 the Supreme Court dropped the immunity decision in Trump v. US, informing the former president that, should he manage to get himself back into the White House, he was free to do any and all crimes. Of freakin’ course he is going to violate every law he can in an effort to burn down the government and enrich himself and his cronies.

One last point on the utterly craven lawlessness we are witnessing: Trump could simply seek “the Consent of Congress” for this rancid bribe. The Constitution explicitly allows the president to seek a waiver from the legislature if he wants to accept tips from foreign governments. And this Congress, dominated by lackeys and sycophants and weak men, would almost certainly give Trump what he wants. But that would be acknowledging that the president must abide by the laws of this land, and so the very act of seeking permission is off the table.