Chris Lehmann writes:

Back when outrage over Donald Trump’s blatant Oval Office corruption was still a novelty, a group of former national security officials filed an amicus brief in a 2019 lawsuit Democratic congressional leaders brought over Trump’s repeated violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. They cited one scenario as a clear and present threat to US national security interests: “A nation that plays a central role in the balance of power in the Middle East, one of the most fraught regions for U.S. national security in the world [could] curry favor with the President by purchasing real estate from one of his companies.”

Like much of the grim constitutional prophesying of that bygone era, this hypothetical illustration now looks laughably naive. Trump-branded real-estate conflicts in the Middle East still abound, of course—most notoriously via Trump’s son-in-law and erstwhile Middle East envoy Jared Kushner’s billion-dollar dealings with the Saudis. Yet Trump’s own newly announced deal with the Qatari royal family to deliver him a new Air Force One jet worth $400 million marks a breathtaking new level of presidential corruption. Indeed, the transaction, which has been hastily packaged as a “gift” from the Qatari government to the Pentagon, is a textbook illustration of the imperial corruption that the founders targeted in drafting the Emoluments Clause, which forbids the president from using his office for personal enrichment. Trump announced the deal on the eve of his first Middle East junket in his second term. The president’s visit to Qatar is bound to be steeped in superlative appreciations of his customized Boeing 747-8, which its original owners have quaintly dubbed “a palace in the sky.”

You can instantly gauge the depth of the self-dealing here by Trump’s overheated defense of the transaction. In an X post, the president announced, “The fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist that we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA.”

This outburst showcases every element of the Trumpian defense of corruption, starting with the mind-bending assertion that insulating the presidency from foreign financial influence is somehow a “Crooked” political maneuver, as opposed to a central plank of constitutional governance. There’s also the ludicrous notion that the Qatari emolument is a savvy piece of deal-making, and not a quid-pro-quo arrangement to benefit the donor. The tell here is Trump’s adverbial stipulation that the deal is temporary; if it were such a self-evident boon to the country, shouldn’t it be permanent? In reality, of course, ownership of the airborne palace will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation at the end of his term—the deal employs the federal government as a dummy corporation that’s hosting a pass-through arrangement to land the aircraft safely in Trump’s gilded empire of grift. [Continue reading…]

Garrett Graff writes:

[T]oday’s planes offer a lot of opportunities for hiding things—even before you get into talking about physical vulnerabilities or tracking devices. Planes today are effectively flying computers. The Boeing 787 and Boeing 777 have millions of lines of code; the Boeing 747, being older, has fewer—perhaps only in the hundreds of thousands of code—but how much those matter was illustrated by the two crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX, which, experts say, happened because the plane lacked eight specific lines of computer code.

Sure, we’d scrub and upgrade the new plane’s computers, etc., etc., but the entire “end of the year” timeline all-but screams “We’re going to cut a lot of corners to have this plane ready for Donald Trump’s whims.”

Moreover, Trump’s obvious obsession with the idea that this plane represents a “palace in the sky” indicates that he’s going to push to keep as much of the already-installed luxury as possible, increasingly the risk profile and so-called “attack surface.” Do you really think he’s going to inherit a plane outfitted for a literal emir and then be okay with replacing everything inside with standard government-issue chairs and toilets?

If you were the Secret Service and the Air Force, how would you ever feel comfortable knowing that you had done all you could to mitigate the risks of a president flying on this plane? Why as a nation would we ever accept this risk? Trump’s been known to be interested in this plane since he reviewed it at Palm Beach in February, so it’s not even merely the “friendly” intelligence services of Qatar that we should be concerned about—every friendly and adversary intelligence service worth its salt surely has been looking for months now to get aboard that plane. [Continue reading…]