Trump Accepting a 400 Million Dollar Flying Palace from Qatar is Flagrant Corruption. Will It Matter?
After extensive, costly renovations that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take years, Donald Trump will fly around the world in a garish gold 400 million dollar flying palace he received as a bribe from Qatar. Trump’s off-brand Money Plane is a giant, glaring, golden symbol of corruption.
It’s an act of rank criminality only slightly subtler than being given a giant bag with a dollar sign on it from a cigar-smoking mobster on national television.
This particularly shameless exercise received harsh bipartisan criticism here. Democrats were apoplectic at how shamelessly Trump flaunted his contempt for the rules.
The gift of a 400 million dollar gold plane fit for a Saudi Arabian oil magnate or James Bond villain was not criticized in Qatar, because criticizing the government or the ruling family is illegal. Journalists can also be prosecuted for insulting Islam, the oil-rich nation’s official religion.
Trump is doing his damnedest to make criticizing him and his government illegal, but is hamstrung by that pesky First Amendment and the Bill of Rights.
Trump gushed defensively of his latest and most egregious act of corruption, " Why should our military, and therefore our taxpayers, be forced to pay hundreds of millions of Dollars when they can get it for FREE from a country that wants to reward us for a job well done. These big savings will be spent, instead, to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our Country. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Qatar doesn’t want anything in return for its half-billion-dollar gift! They just liked Trump’s cool dance moves and wanted to give him a gift that reflected that enthusiasm.
Trump may be the most nakedly transactional president in history, but he was nevertheless sure that the monarchy of the Muslim country wanted nothing more than to see him smile and thank him for a job well done.
Only a grade A Poindexter would be offered a 400 million dollar plane by a foreign country and demur on the ground that doing so is “illegal” and “unethical” and “explicitly forbidden by the Constitution” and “a source of shame for our nation and government.”
Trump has been aggressively pursuing new forms of bribery. People who want to influence the president and get him to do their bidding—I mean, reward him for a job well done!—could buy wildly overvalued stock in Truth Social, a business Trump has made billions off despite its stubborn inability to turn a profit or grow an audience.
They can also buy NFTs of AI art depicting Trump in a series of macho tableaus and His and Her meme coins from Donald and Melania Trump.
Can you imagine anything more exciting than a Melania Trump meme coin, except for a 40 million dollar Brett Ratner-directed documentary about a woman no one wants to know anything about?
I want nothing more than for the Republicans to get destroyed in the 2026 midterms. I want Democrats all over the country to run commercials associating local GOP candidates with Trump and his tariffs and his giant gold plane.
I would like to think that even Trump’s base is disgusted by the clear-cut corruption of accepting a 400 million flying bribe from a country whose official religion Trump has spent his career villifying.
The right would be much happier if Trump got his nearly half-billion-dollar bribe from a country with white citizens and a Christian majority.
This shows that other countries can get what they want from Trump through gifts, guile, and shameless flattery.
The optics of Trump spending the years being photographed and filmed in a giant, gaudy, gold icon of greed aren’t great. I’d love to think that the American people will be repulsed by his massive public bribe, but I’m not sure they will.
After all, Trump’s cult does not worship him because he is ethical. They do not venerate him because he plays by the rules. His popularity is not rooted in his piousness, righteousness, or morals.
Trump wasn’t elected twice because he is a good, kind leader or a man of principles.
No, Trump was elected because he presented himself as a figure of vengeance who would use his power to hurt the people they wanted hurt and use his supposed business brilliance and peerless negotiating genius to make us rich and powerful beyond our wildest dreams.
Voters didn’t vote for him despite the crassness, amorality, thuggish obsession with power, and rampant cruelty. They voted for him because he embodied those qualities.
They live through Trump. His victories are their victories. His enemies are their enemies and the enemies of the people.
They think that Trump saved our country from Woke and DEI and trans and illegal immigrants so he deserves to sleep with porn stars and Playboy models, make billions off sketchy crypto schemes and fly around in a 400 million dollar flying palace.
Besides, Trump is not doing it for himself; he’s doing it for national pride.
He’s owning the Libs. He’s trolling. He’s doing it precisely because it makes you mad. He’s collecting all the yummy Liberal tears shed over his clear-cut villainy.
Part of Trump’s justification for keeping the plane, then spending hundreds of millions more to turn it into Air Force One, is that we’re the biggest, best country, so we deserve the biggest, best toys.
“We’re the United States of America—I believe that we should have the most impressive plane,” the 78-year-old bragged.
There’s a reason they call him the Teflon Don. Egregious actions that would end the political careers of anyone else, like proudly accepting a 400 million dollar bribe, don’t affect him. This might be embarrassing now, but will anyone remember this escapade two years from now? He’ll have committed three hundred more equally insane and wrong transgressions by then.
We’d like to think that even right-wing partisans will be embarrassed by this particular con's boorishness, but if they were capable of embarrassment, they wouldn’t be Trump supporters.
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