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Why Qatar's Luxury Plane Gift May Be Just The Key To Trump's Heart
Forbes Breaking News
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5/14/2025
On "Forbes Newsroom," Forbes Senior Wealth Editor Dan Alexander discussed Qatar's gifting a luxury plane to President Trump, which tracks with Trump's longstanding love of luxury aircraft.
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00:00
Hi, everyone. I'm Maggie McGrath, senior editor at Forbes. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle
00:08
are questioning the White House's plan to accept a luxury airplane from the Qatari government.
00:15
President Donald Trump has called it a very nice gesture. And as my colleague Dan Alexander
00:21
reports this morning, this comment follows a long history of being obsessed by luxury
00:28
and oversized airplanes. Dan is a senior editor and also the author of White House Inc. He is very
00:34
familiar with the president's fortunes and follies. And he joins us now to talk about this fascinating
00:39
issue. Dan, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Maggie. So you published a story this morning
00:46
titled Trump's Jumbo Jet Obsession Through the Years. And before we talk about what's going on
00:51
right now, I think there's some important context here that really goes back to the 1980s, if not
00:56
before. What is most important for Forbes audience members to understand about the president and
01:03
his love of oversized airplanes? Well, I think that when this issue first came up about Qatar
01:10
and this new airplane, a lot of people's first reaction is sort of why? Why is he focused on
01:15
this? Why doesn't it matter? And the reason is because this is something that Donald Trump has
01:20
cared an awful lot about for a really, really long time. You know, there's sort of two different
01:25
sorts of buyers of luxury airplanes. You have people who buy them for function. So let's say
01:31
that you have, say, manufacturing facilities all over the United States. You need to go visit a half
01:36
dozen of them in one day. You need to do that in private plane because you can't possibly do that
01:41
in commercial airfare. Then there are people who buy them for ego. And you can tell which person a
01:49
buyer is by what they choose to buy. There are lots of planes that don't fit into many airports.
01:55
And so they're really pretty impractical. Like, for example, a Boeing 757. That's what Donald Trump
02:00
owns right now. Before this, he owned a Boeing 727, also too large to fit in some airports.
02:07
And so he's chosen something that makes a big statement that shows, hey, I'm powerful. Look at me.
02:12
I got this big plane, but isn't actually very functional. What is the make and model of the
02:20
proposed gift from the Qataris? And I suppose I should note that right now this is just a proposal.
02:24
They have not yet made the official offer. Is that correct? Well, who knows where they are in terms of,
02:31
you know, what constitutes official and what doesn't. This is a Boeing 747. The Qataris bought
02:37
it for $200 million and they spent more than $200 million refurbishing it. You can spend insane
02:44
amounts of money on airplanes, but like spending insane amounts of money on, for example, luxury
02:48
real estate, you don't necessarily always get a return on that investment. So the Qataris were
02:54
initially looking to shop this plane and were expecting to get about $275 million for it, which
03:01
would have been a loss, but would have allowed them to recoup some of the money. But they did get some
03:05
offers of roughly $200 million and ultimately decided to ignore those and instead go with a
03:12
different sort of return on investment, which they apparently thought they could get by giving
03:17
this thing to Donald Trump. Do we know what they want in return for donating this luxury airplane?
03:27
Well, we don't know specifically, but certainly there are a lot of possibilities. You know, Qatar,
03:31
its relationship with the United States is fundamental to what the country is and what the
03:38
country needs. Qatar is the site of one of the largest U.S. bases in the Middle East. We've been
03:44
basically operating in the Afghan war and in the Iraq war out of Qatar for many years. We put billions
03:51
upon billions of dollars into that base. Also, Qatar is locked up in all these fractious disputes with
03:58
its neighbors. It's been accused over time of financing terrorism. In fact, Donald Trump, when he first
04:06
took office in 2017, he sort of was siding with the neighbors against Qatar, saying that really that we
04:13
should look into whether Qatar was financing terrorists. And then after Qatar made some moves
04:20
that ingratiated themselves or apparently did with Trump in the first term, he flipped positions
04:26
and said, really, Qatar is great. And we're big supporters of these guys. And we love the
04:31
investments that they make inside of our country. So they've seen that by getting on Trump's good
04:37
side, it can have tangible benefits for policy. And by combining sort of that instinct with what
04:46
appears to be a pretty fundamental and deep knowledge of what makes Donald Trump tick, they've maybe come
04:52
up with sort of a massive stroke of diplomacy here, at least on their end. We'll see if Trump's able to make it
04:58
work on his end.
05:01
Going back to that first administration that started in 2017, the Qataris seem to have rented property within a
05:11
building that Trump owned. Whatever came of that particular issue?
05:15
Well, that's right. I mean, the Qataris were essentially leasing what appeared to be a dummy
05:21
office, empty office space inside 555 California Street in San Francisco.
05:27
I went there and tried to figure out what was going on there. The office was empty and there was
05:34
nobody inside. And so it looks like they might have been doing this because the largest individual
05:38
owner of that building with a 30 percent stake is Donald Trump. Ultimately, nothing happened with the
05:45
issue, just the same as so many other issues that raise concerns about emoluments in the first
05:52
administration. You know, Trump took these things through court and they were still working their
05:59
way through court when he lost to Joe Biden. And then ultimately they were dismissed with the courts
06:04
figuring, well, this is a non-issue now, so we don't have to worry about it. Of course, here we are again
06:09
a handful of years later talking about the same things.
06:11
I was just about to ask for folks who are not legal scholars, can you remind them what the
06:17
emoluments clause is? Because we talked about it a lot during the first administration and I feel
06:21
like tariffs have so far been the word of the last 100 days. So emoluments have kind of snuck up in
06:27
there. But what is most important to know about the emoluments clause?
06:31
Yes, the emoluments clause is a part of the constitution that basically says the president can't
06:35
accept gifts or money or crimes from foreign governments. And these can come in the form of,
06:42
you know, packages or items or money or whatever without the approval of Congress. So they can't
06:48
accept them if they get Congress's approval. And this is a big issue in the first administration
06:53
because Donald Trump, of course, was accepting money through his businesses from all sorts of foreign
06:58
governments. But in that time, you know, we were talking about, for example, like the Saudi government
07:04
renting hundreds of thousands of dollars to hotel rooms inside Trump's hotel in Washington, D.C.
07:10
There was some question and the Trump organization and the White House were defending it, saying,
07:14
hey, this is actually just a standard business transaction. Now you're in a different situation.
07:19
Okay, so this is roughly a $400 million asset that they're just giving, clearly not a standard
07:25
business transaction. Now the Trump administration is saying, well, it's actually a gift to the country
07:30
and not directly to the president. Okay, you know, constitutional scholars believe this is a
07:36
violation of the emoluments clause and that Trump needs to get approval from Congress. We'll see
07:41
whether he does that. If he doesn't, it could just put us right back in the same situation as he was in
07:46
the first term, where he just sort of, you know, blows through the rules and there's litigation and
07:51
we'll see what happens and whether the courts can move fast enough to keep up.
07:54
Are you surprised that members of both parties have expressed concern over this gift from the
08:02
Qataris? Not terribly. There are certain moments when the ethics issues become so obvious that it's
08:11
impossible to ignore. And, you know, in this case, Republicans think this is really kind of a black
08:17
eye on the party and this doesn't make any sense. There's no strategic benefit. You saw this,
08:23
for example, in the first term, when Donald Trump decided to direct the G7 Summit of World Leaders
08:29
to Doral, his golf course in Miami. And, you know, they were looking for sites and Trump said,
08:35
hey, what about Doral? And then lo and behold, they decided that they were going to put it in
08:38
Doral and they announced that's where it was all going to be. That event never happened because
08:42
COVID interfered. But even before that, Trump backed off because he received so much criticism
08:49
from his own party. It'll be interesting to see if in the second term, whether he feels so invincible
08:55
that he's does not do what he did then and back off or whether we see history repeat itself. And he
09:01
says, you know what, maybe I want to step too far. And yeah, it was a good deal. And I'm a great
09:05
businessman. But because all these people are complaining, you know, to keep the peace,
09:09
I'm not going to do it. We'll see how it plays out. It's interesting, too. I saw one interview
09:13
with a Republican senator who basically said if he's going to use that plane, they need to sweep
09:18
it for bugs. And I think that's kind of emblematic of some of what we're seeing from both sides of the
09:24
aisle. Now, Trump seems to be and the White House writ large seems to be saying this will be a donation
09:32
to the Department of Defense. Is that a workaround here in your view? Or could that be?
09:38
We'll see whether they're able to work through the legal channels to make that happen. But the
09:45
reality is, from a strategic standpoint, it doesn't really make any sense. I mean, there's all sorts
09:50
of costs with having to outfit this and make sure that it's capable of operating as an Air Force One,
09:57
make sure that it doesn't have any bugs in it, that there aren't any security limitations.
10:01
And I remember the reason that Qatar wanted to get rid of this. You know, we talked to the broker
10:05
who was working with Qatar on ditching these airplanes. And what he said is basically these
10:10
things are expensive just to maintain and to keep around. And they were trying to sell it and they
10:14
had trouble selling it. And finally, they thought, you know what, rather than continue to pay all this
10:19
money to service this thing, let's just give it away. So it's not exactly like the free gift that
10:24
it seems. You know, there's all these associated expenses that come with receiving an airplane like
10:28
this.
10:29
Is there any reporting that you left on the cutting room floor that you think is interesting
10:34
or might prove fodder for a second story here? I know you do thorough research and this is
10:39
fascinating. Anything you learned that didn't make it into the final story today?
10:43
Yeah, there were some interesting things. One thing, if somebody told me that Donald Trump,
10:47
you know, there are all these questions about security and the safety of this airplane. Somebody
10:51
told me that Donald Trump has really studied up on airplane crashes, that it's sort of like an
10:58
interest of his. And he was telling me this story about one time they were sitting waiting to take
11:03
off. There was some delay. And Trump was in his plane just like regaling everybody about all these
11:07
stories about crashes of Learjets, which was a type of plane that he did not have. And he was sort of,
11:13
you know, scoffing at these Learjets. But Trump also, interestingly, does have some personal
11:19
history with aircraft crashes. There were several of those executives went down on a flight from New
11:27
York to Atlantic City and were killed. And it really wiped out a lot of the top management of
11:31
his casinos at one point. And then something that I didn't know is that then there was another
11:37
helicopter incident involving a guy who was the CEO of one of his casinos, where as they were taking
11:45
off, all the smoke started pouring out and they had to bail on the helicopter. And the guy who told
11:50
me this was an old communications consultant for Trump. And he said that the Asbury Park Press
11:54
caught wind of it and called him up and were trying to figure it out. And he was very proud of the fact
12:00
that they basically managed to mute the story. And it ran just, you know, as a short story in Asbury
12:05
Park Press and nobody else really picked it out. And I had never heard of it. But sure enough, I went and
12:10
looked it up, found the old archives in the Asbury Park Press. And it's sort of, you know, mysteriously
12:14
written, they didn't know exactly who was in the helicopter. But there was this other helicopter
12:19
incident involved. And that was one that Trump actually owned himself. So he does, he's aware
12:25
and has experience with some safety issues, obviously, none dealing with the national security
12:31
concerns that we're looking at here. But it is something that that is on his mind and has been
12:36
for a long time. Well, it should be given some of the air traffic control issues we've seen out of
12:41
Philadelphia and Newark this week and more broadly this year. But that is an entirely separate news
12:47
story. So on the matter of the Qatari plane, Trump's Middle East tour and his general interest
12:53
in airplanes, what will you be looking at going forward? What are the questions you think you'll
12:57
be asking your sources in the coming days and weeks? Well, I think that some of the interesting
13:02
things are going to play out pretty much in public. Does Trump back down or not? You know,
13:06
with all this pushback and say, you know, it's just not worth the headache. And then secondly,
13:10
what are the legal ramifications that come of this? It would be shocking to me if there aren't
13:15
lawsuits filed, you know, almost immediately. And then seeing how the White House moves those
13:21
through the courts, how the Justice Department moves those through the courts, and whether the
13:24
courts are able to respond more quickly, given that they've already seen some discussion
13:28
on emoluments issues this time, or whether they're just going to continue to kick the can down the
13:33
road, we won't really have any understanding of what the practical laws are here, even through
13:39
the end of this term. As is typical for the second term, it seems like uncertainty and questions are
13:46
the two words of the day. But in the meantime, Dan Alexander, thank you so much for joining us and
13:51
sharing your reporting. Everyone can go read Dan's story on Forbes.com right now. Thank you so much.
13:58
Sure. Thanks. Thanks, Maggie.
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