There is something peculiarly foolhardy about a $400 million jet, courtesy of the Qatari regime, being accepted into the custody of the United States government, only to find itself destined to be rehomed, like some gleaming mechanical orphan, in the arms of the Trump Presidential Library. The problem goes beyond its appearance, but in its implications: that a sitting president, entrusted with the awesome powers of the republic, may so brazenly flirt with private inurement. This, we are told, is simply a matter of logistics. Bureaucratic formality. A “temporary transfer.” Of course. And I am Catherine the Great.
One must pause here to reflect on how our outrage is apportioned. When Hillary Clinton’s foundation accepted $25 million from the Saudis—a donation plainly intended to curry favor with a potential president, and cause American intervention into Syria—we Republicans rang out with righteous fury, and rightly so. Influence peddling, we cried! Foreign meddling! Corruption masquerading as charity! And we were right about all of those things. But now we are asked, with a straight face, to regard a $400 million aircraft from Qatar to the library of the sitting President of the United States, destined for his own presidential library, as somehow unproblematic? The same Qatar that bankrolls Islamist propaganda via Al Jazeera, sponsors Hamas-linked actors in Gaza, and plays both sides of every Middle Eastern conflict like a shell game?
Let us be very clear: at best, this is a bad look. At worst, it is an unforced error of the highest order, an ethical own-goal by the very people who claim to be restoring dignity and order to the republic. Accepting the plane into the Department of Defense—fine. Keep it there. Use it for our new Air Force One. Or use it for training. Strip it for parts. Sell it at auction and donate the proceeds to underfunded veterans’ hospitals or homeless shelters. Whatever. As long as it’s to remain for use by the government, or sold for some charitable purpose, fine. But for the President to hand it off, very openly, to his own presidential vanity project? That veers too close to the line, and gives his opponents too much ammunition.
It is the nature of political hypocrisy to excuse in ourselves what we condemn in others. The left does it with its slogans of tolerance and equity while crushing dissent and hoarding elite power. But now we on the right, in our tribal loyalty to Trump, risk becoming equally contaminated. We are trading principles for pragmatism and ethics for expediency. And if we continue down this path, we will deserve every accusation once hurled at our opponents.
Conservatives should have been the first to reject this gift. Not because it is illegal—though one wonders if that question has truly been tested—but because it is indecent. It is unseemly. And it is entirely unnecessary. The Trump Library, like every presidential library, will attract its donors. It will not lack for private money. There was no need to accept a foreign government’s multimillion-dollar offering, much less one with a documented history of buying favor with Western institutions.
But what makes this particularly dangerous is that it is happening while Trump is still in power. We are not talking about a retrospective honorarium or a posthumous gesture allocated by Congress. This is a live transaction, from a foreign state to the personal legacy of a man who presently holds the nuclear codes. How, precisely, is this not an attempt to buy influence? What, exactly, does Qatar expect in return—and how quickly do they expect it? Does anybody believe the answer is “nothing”? And even if it is, that we even have to ask this question is problematic in and of itself.
This moment, like so many in the Trumpian era, is a test of whether our movement is guided by principles or by personality cult. Will we excuse anything, overlook everything, so long as it is done by our man? If so, we have become precisely what we once mocked in the Clintons: a grinning dynasty of entitlement, cloaked in populist rhetoric but stuffed with the spoils of global oligarchy.
There is still time to correct this. Trump can reverse course on the eventual transfer of the plane to his own presidential library. Use it in the meantime, then pass it off to the next president. Or sell the jet and give the money to the poor. But the longer we pretend there is nothing wrong here, the more we signal that we, too, are for sale.
