Shane Harris writes:

Donald Trump really wanted the plane. The Qataris had flown the $400 million Boeing 747 to West Palm Beach just after he returned to the White House so he could run his hands over the soft leather chairs and inspect the sycamore- and wacapou-wood veneers. A sales brochure had described the en-suite master bathroom, with its mother-of-pearl inlays, as “almost a piece of art.”

The plane was a flying palace fit for a Persian Gulf monarch, or an American president who would like to live like one. But its operating costs—about $25,000 per flight hour—were steep even for the Qatari royal family. The government had been trying to sell it for five years.

The Qataris knew Trump would want the plane. They understood the man, and his taste. It sat in the same aesthetic register as the comparatively puny “Trump Force One,” the gold-heavy Boeing 757 that he had flown as a private citizen. They also knew that Trump didn’t like the aging, baby-blue 747s that had been carrying presidents since 1990. He’d ordered two new planes from Boeing in 2018, but they were years behind schedule. Trump wanted the 11-bathroom Qatari plane, repainted in a red-white-and-blue color scheme. And he wanted it in time for a flyover on America’s 250th birthday.

This was an absurd demand. Air Force One is meant to serve as an airborne military command post. The Qatari jet would have to be stripped to the studs and retrofitted with encrypted-communications equipment, as well as special material to shield it against the radiological blast of a nuclear weapon, and a variety of countermeasures to foil missiles and rockets. It had taken a Parisian design firm four years to complete the plane’s interiors. It could take American engineers at least that long to convert the jet into a flying fortress.

But these were details to be worked out later. Or not. The Qataris drew up the paperwork for a government-to-government sale. But they should have seen Trump’s next move coming.

People close to Trump—it’s still not clear who—suggested to the Qataris that instead of selling the plane, they could donate it to the United States. A gift. A freebie from “friends” who had already put hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s son-in-law’s private-equity firm and bought a debt-laden Manhattan hotel belonging to Steve Witkoff, his Middle East special envoy, for $623 million. That’s to say nothing of the $8 billion they’d spent to build the Americans an air base—the biggest U.S. military base in the Middle East—or their plans to spend $10 billion more to enhance and maintain it. What was another $400 million, for a plane that the president so dearly loved?

Even some Qatari leaders were surprised by the president’s gall. But they did what they’ve always done when an American official has asked them for something dubious—politically, ethically, or even legally. They said yes. [Continue reading…]