Earlier this week, President Trump confirmed on Truth Social that his administration plans to accept what may be the most lavish and expensive foreign gift in U.S. history: a $400 million luxury jet from the Qatari royal family that Trump intends to use as Air Force One for the rest of his term and transfer to his presidential foundation after leaving office.
Defending the move, which was first reported by ABC News, Trump insisted Monday that only a "stupid person" would "turn down that kind of an offer."
"I mean, I could be a stupid person and say, 'No, we don't want a free, very expensive airplane,'" the president told reporters. "But it was — I thought it was a great gesture."
Yet even some of Trump's supporters have questioned whether accepting the jet would violate the Constitution's ban of foreign 'emoluments' — amounting, in effect, to a "bribe."
"A $400 million plane is not a gift," pro-MAGA columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon said Monday on Newsmax. "It's a bribe."
"I think if we switched the names to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, we'd all be freaking out on the right," Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro added Monday on his podcast. "President Trump promised to drain the swamp. This is not, in fact, draining the swamp."
It's "really going to be such a stain on the admin if this is true," agreed close Trump ally Laura Loomer,writing on X. "And I say that as someone who would take a bullet for Trump. I'm so disappointed."
At the same time, independent watchdogs have pointed out that Trump’s interest in a “free” Qatari jet is hardly an isolated incident. Instead, they contend that it’s part of an emerging pattern that’s been overlooked amid all the news about tariffs, deportations and DOGE.
Emboldened by last year's Supreme Court ruling granting presidents immunity for their official actions, Trump has used his second stint in the Oval Office to openly enrich himself and advance his personal interests in ways that make the ethical complaints of his first term look quaint in comparison, experts say — while eliminating key protections against influence peddling and firing officials tasked with rooting out corruption.
With the president now embarked on a Middle East trip to three countries where his family’s private company has recently made lucrative business deals — Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — here’s a quick guide to the biggest corruption concerns and possible conflicts of interest swirling around Trump 2.0.
A Boeing 747-8 from Qatar
In 2018, Trump awarded a $3.9 billion government contract to Boeing for two customized 747s — the next generation of Air Force One. But delays and cost overruns have plagued the planes for the last seven years, and they still haven’t been delivered; instead, the president has been forced to keep using the same old Air Force Ones, which date to 1990 and require frequent repairs. It’s a situation that’s frustrated Trump ever since he returned to office in January.
Last year, Boeing estimated that the aircraft would not be ready until 2029 — after Trump leaves the White House.
Enter the Qatari royal family. According to ABC, Trump toured the Qatari-owned 747-8 — a $400 million "flying palace" complete with three lounges, two bedrooms, nine bathrooms, five galleys, a private office and a glittering golden staircase — when it was parked at the West Palm Beach International Airport in February.
He evidently liked what he saw. According to the Wall Street Journal, the administration has already commissioned the aviation company L3Harris to upgrade the plane to meet presidential requirements, and Trump planned to announce its acquisition in Qatar this week. (Those plans have since been put on hold.)
Trump's top White House lawyer also asked Attorney General Pam Bondi — who once worked as a highly paid lobbyist for Qatar — to weigh in on whether it was legal for the Defense Department to accept such a generous gift, given that the Constitution prohibits government officials from taking "any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."
According to ABC’s sources, “both the White House and DOJ concluded that because the gift is not conditioned on any official act, it does not constitute bribery,” while “Bondi's legal analysis” added that “it does not run afoul of the Constitution's prohibition on foreign gifts because the plane is not being given to an individual, but rather to the United States Air Force and, eventually, to the presidential library foundation.”
Critics disagree with Bondi's analysis. Speaking to NPR, Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who specializes in government ethics, described the gifted jet as a "pretty textbook case of a violation of the Emoluments Clause."
"[Gifts are] designed to create good feelings for the recipient and to get some kind of reciprocity," Briffault said. "But the thing that [Trump] can give, of course, is public policy — weapons deals or whatever. And then, of course, it's an incentive to other countries to give similar gifts as another way of influencing presidential decision-making."
Meanwhile, the Trump Organization — the president's main, real-estate-centric family business, which is now run by his sons Eric and Don, Jr. — just struck its first deal foreign deal since Trump returned to office: a new luxury golf and beachside-villa complex in … Qatar.
"At this point, it's impossible to tell the difference between decisions being made by the White House for the good of the country and for the good of the Trump Organization," a spokesman for the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told the New York Times.
In 2017, Trump accused Qatar of sponsoring terrorism.
Foreign real estate deals
When he took office in 1977, Jimmy Carter put his Georgia peanut farm in a blind trust to avoid the appearance of conflict; four years later, Ronald Reagan liquidated his personal holdings — worth about $740,000 — and did the same with the proceeds.
Trump has always been different. During his first term, he refused to divest from the Trump Organization or create a blind trust. But he did sign an ethics pact that barred the family business from striking deals with foreign governments and foreign companies.
Not so this time around. In January, the Trump Organization announced that doing business with foreign companies was now very much on the table.
“The scale of corruption will be orders of magnitude greater than what we saw in the first Trump administration,” government ethics lawyer Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law in St. Louis predicted at the time. Clark added that foreign actors trying to curry favor with the president now had an easy way to do it: by plowing “massive influxes of cash” into various Trump “ventures.”
She was certainly right about the foreign cash. In recent weeks, Trump's sons have traveled the world and announced new overseas business deals involving billions of dollars, including a luxury hotel in Dubai, a high-end residential tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and the newgolf resort in Qatar.
All told, the Trump Organization is now involved in six Middle Eastern real-estate projects sponsored by Dar Global, the international subsidiary of a Saudi-based firm with close ties to the Saudi royal family.
Don, Jr. and his business partners are also launching a $500,000-a-person private-membership club called Executive Branch in Washington, D.C. "The aim is apparently to cater to deep-pocketed business moguls who want to rub elbows with Trump administration officials outside the view of reporters or Democrats," according to the New York Times.
Trump's financial disclosure report, which he is legally required to file, shows that he still makes money from many of these ventures.
$TRUMP crypto
Outside of the Trump Organization, Trump's sons also run a cryptocurrency firm called World Liberty Financial that they launched with their father last September. So far, it has sold at least $550 million in digital coins — 75% of which goes to a business entity linked to the president, who is still listed as World Liberty's chief crypto advocate.
Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that an Emirati venture fund backed by the government of Abu Dhabi was using the Trump firm's digital coins to make a $2 billion business deal. The paper went on to characterize the arrangement as "a major contribution by a foreign government to President Trump's private venture" that will "generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family."
And “it’s only the beginning,” Zach Witkoff, a co-founder of the Trump crypto firm, vowed at the time. (Witkoff’s father, Steve Witkoff, serves as the president’s envoy to the Middle East.)
Trump himself wasn't always sold on cryptocurrency, which enables money to move around anonymously, without any involvement from banks. "I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air," he said in a series of social media posts in 2019. "Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity."
Bitcoin "just seems like a scam," Trump added in 2021; cryptocurrencies are a "disaster waiting to happen."
“I think they should regulate them very, very high,” he concluded.
Yet Trump changed his mind on the campaign trail last year, eventually pledging to transform the United States into "the crypto capital of the planet." The crypto industry spent tens of millions of dollars to help Trump win, then donated $18 million to his inauguration.
Why the shift? Just before returning to the Oval Office, Trump started selling $TRUMP, a so-called memecoin — that is, a type of cryptocurrency “based on an online joke or celebrity mascot” with no real use “beyond speculation,” according to the New York Times. First Lady Melania Trump issued her own memecoin the same weekend.
Investors in foreign countries, some of whom openly admit they want to influence the president, have rushed to stock up — including a tiny TikTok e-commerce company with ties to China (and no revenue) that somehow just secured funding to buy up to $300 million of the $TRUMP coin at the same time the president is seeking a deal that would allow the Chinese-owned video sharing app to keep operating in the U.S.
Last week, Trump steered his Truth Social followers to a sweepstakes of sorts: buy enough of the $TRUMP coin to become one of its top 220 investors, and you get to attend an "intimate private dinner" with the president later this month; buy enough to become one of the top 25, and you win a "VIP White House Tour." (The words "White House" were later scrubbed from the site.) Another round of frantic speculation ensued, further enriching the Trump family.
All told, the paper value of Trump's crypto empire is now nearing $1 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has disbanded a Justice Department unit dedicated to investigating cryptocurrency crimes; declared that memecoins are no longer subject to regulatory oversight; and agreed to pause a fraud case against a top crypto mogul who pumped $75 million into Trump tokens.
