Jumbo G(r)ift

DoD accepts Qatari Jumbo Jet gift--and that's just the tip of the griftberg.

The Qatari government’s gift of the $400M Boeing 747, known as the “Flying Palace” is certainly in line with President Trump’s monarchial desires, which necessarily means it flies in the face of the Constitution, a document that doesn’t mince words about such gifts.

Even before the Constitution was written, it was in the Articles of Confederation (1781) as Article VI, Paragraph I: Nor shall any person holding any office of profit or trust under the United States, or any of them, accept any present, emolument, office or title of any kind whatever from any King, Prince or foreign State; nor shall the United States in Congress assembled, or any of them, grant any title of nobility. (In the Constitution, it is Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 9…and there goes the whole “King” thing as well.)

The Free Press:

I admittedly have a love/hate relationship with Bari Weiss, the former Wall Street Journal and New York Times opinion editor. Bari edited a piece I wrote for the Journal a number of years ago, and the process was like pulling teeth. Obviously, I’m liberal, and Bari is conservative. Unhappy at the Times, she got funding and started The Free Press, an instantly successful digital news sight that is populated by conservative intellectuals (shhh—they don’t want you know that there are conservative egg-heads too, for that holds a mirror up to their hypocritical derision of academics, a favorite sport around Mar-a-Lago). The Free Press has turned into a juggernaut, gaining subscribers faster than the proverbial snowball down the mountainside. It’s opinion DNA is steeped in MAGA politics, but its saving grace is that it does high quality original reporting. Tucker Carlson’s fact-free propaganda rag, The Daily Caller, it is not.

I find it interesting, and not a little relieving, that after investigation, The Free Press is as concerned about Qatar and the Flying Palace as folks on the left: “Qatar, long a refuge for and a financier of Islamist terrorists, has spent almost $100 billion over the past two decades to influence our schools, our universities, our media, our Congress, and even the White House itself. In return for all that cash, it has won the affection of leading lawmakers, Washington dealmakers, powerful journalists, and White House officials.

“So what does Qatar want to do with all the goodwill it’s purchased? That’s just one of the questions [our] reporting sets out to answer.

“Like many great scandals, this one has been hiding in plain sight, with Qatar openly throwing cash around to buy allies in America while actively supporting groups that push Islamist radicalism in the Middle East.”

The administration has arranged a legal—but ethically dubious—workaround the Emoluments Clause by designating the Flying Palace as a gift to the Department of Defense, not the president. Nonetheless, he gets to keep it when his term is up. The current messaging says it’s going to his library, and that he’ll not use it personally. As my mother used to say, everyone who believes that, stand on your head.

It would be bad enough if this were the only current grift, but I’m afraid it pales in comparison to the crypto coin grift. The gifted, gilded airplane is just Three Card Monty compared to its big brother, World Liberty Financial. The Trumps produced “$TRUMP” and “$MELANIA” coins that investors and speculators snapped up, with 75% of the proceeds going to the Trumps. Abu Dhabi’s state-backed investment firm, MGX has already invested $2B.

We’re running out of words for this behavior. It’s self-dealing on a level we’ve never imagined, let alone seen. “Unprecedented” no longer butters the biscuit. “Grift” sounds small time, like carnies, or street corner conmen. “Conflict of interest” makes it sound quaint. “Lawless corruption” gets as close as I can in a family newspaper.

Conservative stalwart and superstar jurist, J. Michael Luttig, isn’t playing along with the spineless Congressional Republicans who learned “roll over” and “play dead” faster than an Australian Shepherd. He’s in The Atlantic (gift article) with a blistering appraisal of the president’s conduct:

“The president of the United States appears to have long ago forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War not merely to secure their independence from the British monarchy but to establish a government of laws, not of men, so that they and future generations of Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in 1776, “For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

Your eleven year old “baby girl” (huh?) only gets one doll this Christmas, but the President gets Barbie’s Dream House, Flying Palace version.

©2025 Jon Sinton