What The Hell America!

President Donald Trump’s acceptance of the Qatari royal family’s surprise gift of a luxury Boeing 747 jumbo jet marked a new low point for an administration already bottoming out with government ethics. The Constitution forbids the president from receiving foreign gifts, a provision that went unenforced during Trump’s first term as foreign dignitaries, lobbyists, and others poured millions of dollars directly into the president’s pockets by frequenting his privately owned luxury hotels in Washington and elsewhere.

But a $400 million luxury airliner that Trump will use as president and then get to keep upon leaving office—that takes the administration’s corruption to 36,000 feet. It’s a massive, singular gift that arrives loaded with concerns about what kinds of favors the Qatari government is hoping to receive in return for their largesse.

But, surprising no one but future students of American history, not all Senate Republicans appear terribly concerned about this obviously corrupt act.

“Can’t beat free!” said an enthusiastic Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) when I asked if he’d be comfortable with a Democratic president accepting a gift of this magnitude from a foreign government. “It’s a gift to the federal government, it’s going to be for the government’s use.”

“It’s nice,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). “Maybe I’ll get the other one!”

Asked whether he’d be fine with a Democratic president doing the same, Tuberville said, “Yeah, as long as the [Department of Justice] and [attorney general] approve it, yeah. I mean, I don’t know how far it goes back in terms of what it would be used for.”

Right after another reporter asked Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) about his primary challenger Ken Paxton—a man who has had a raft of ethics scandals of his own—I asked Cornyn whether Trump accepting the gift of the free jet from a foreign government was corrupt or above board.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I’ve seen references to it, but I don’t know how that’s all going to sort out. I’m going to wait and see how it settles out.”

The only Senate Republicans who seem bothered by the kingly gift are (surprisingly) Ron Johnson and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who told reporters, “I don’t think it looks good or smells good.” Paul elaborated further in a Monday evening interview with Fox News, during which he said:

The Constitution, in Article II, talks about [how] the president can’t take emoluments or gifts from foreign leaders. And so there is a provision in the Constitution that says you can’t do this. And so the question is: Can you do it if it’s only for official purposes? If it came to someone in Congress, they can vote, and the Ethics Committee can look at it. With this, there will have to be some kind of adjudication. This has never been done, and it’s not like a ride on the plane. We’re talking about the entire $400 million plane. I think it’s not worth the appearance of impropriety, whether it’s improper or not, I don’t think it’s worth it.

The other problem with Qatar is—see—I’ve spent time trying not to sell weapons to Qatar because they have human rights violations of their people. Many of their people are prevented from participating in the government, and some of the minority religious folks in Qatar are treated poorly. And so I really haven’t been a big fan, and I wonder if our ability to judge their human rights record would be clouded by the fact [of] this large gift, so I wouldn’t take it. That’s just me, I don’t think it’s a good idea.

While the corruption angle of the gift is quite clear, it also raises important national security concerns. That’s because, as nice as a $400 million “palace in the sky” sounds, it cannot have been built to the military specifications of Air Force One, an aircraft for which the foremost goal is not creature comforts but the safety and security of its passengers. If the gift goes ahead, the jet will need to be entirely stripped down and rebuilt to make it secure enough for the president to fly in while executing the duties of his office.

“My understanding is that they will have to take the thing apart, and that that will not be an inexpensive proposition,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told me on Monday. “It’s not my first concern. My first concern is that it’s a $400 million gift from a foreign entity that is corrupting. But at the technical level, we can’t be accepting an airplane that was not, from the very beginning, in the possession of the United States military and our intelligence agencies. It is the worst idea among bad ideas.”

Then comes what will happen to the plane after the Trump presidency finally comes to its natural end. If Trump continues to use the jet as a private citizen, he will create new problems. The USAF can’t have an Air Force One clone zipping around for a non-president’s use. Trump has insisted he will park it in his presidential library (as Ronald Reagan’s AF1 sits in a pavilion at his library in Simi Valley, California). But you can’t do that without having the plane decommissioned and having all its critical functions and equipment laboriously removed. So the Qatar plane will have to be stripped down and put back together once again in 2029, costing taxpayers millions more.

“My hope is that we never, ever get to a conversation about the technical aspects about this sale,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said. “This needs to—this cannot happen. It’s time for folks to do the right thing for the country, and put an end to this corruption before it gets so wildly out of control that we don’t have a country any longer.”

While Murphy, Schatz, and others have energetically campaigned against the administration accepting the gift, there doesn’t appear to be much appetite to stop it outside of Democratic circles. Years of fruitless investigations into former President Joe Biden’s family members about supposed profiting from government influence vanished from public view overnight, and no one on the Hill is talking about investigating corruption in government anymore.

Perhaps the reason there isn’t much appetite to investigate the Qatari gift is because so little has been left to the imagination. James Comer’s team spent years creating careful just-so stories and speculative connections between unrelated facts. That’s harder to do in cases like this where the facts tell such a clear and simple story. Perhaps if the corruption were less obvious, it would be more fun for Senate Republicans to speculate about.

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Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made a plea to Fox News viewers on March 19 to buy Tesla stock: “If you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla. . . . It’s unbelievable that this guy’s stock is this cheap. It’ll never be this cheap again.”

In fact, the stock did become cheaper. It went down in the weeks following Lutnick’s comments hitting its 2025 nadir in early April. Since then, however, it has shot back up—now higher than when Lutnick made his suggestion to buy though significantly lower than its peak price in mid-December 2024. Much of the recent growth seems owed, in part, to an improving market overall, itself the result of Trump backing off his trade war with China.

Immediately after Lutnick’s comments, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) sent a letter to the Commerce Department’s acting inspector general questioning the ethics of pitching the public on a government employee’s company.

Reed wrote:

Such hucksterism appears to violate federal ethics rules, which bar federal employees from using their public office “for the endorsement of any product, service, or enterprise.” Additionally, his statements also appear to violate federal conflict-of-interest laws prohibiting federal employees from using their public office to support their personal financial interests because Mr. Lutnick’s Wall Street firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, has exposures to Tesla approaching $1 billion. According to Mr. Lutnick’s ethics agreement with the Commerce Department, he is obligated to divest his majority ownership stake in Cantor Fitzgerald within 90 days of taking office—by April 21. Federal regulations require Mr. Lutnick to publicly certify once he has divested, and such a certification has not been posted to the OGE website. But even when Mr. Lutnick fully divests, his children, whom Mr. Lutnick has installed as senior executives of Cantor Fitzgerald, will benefit from movement in Telsa’s stock price prompted by Mr. Lutnick’s public pronouncements.

In light of these statements, I ask that you open an investigation into Mr. Lutnick’s compliance with Federal ethics rules and the laws prohibiting conflicts of interest. To the extent permissible under the rules and regulations of your agencies, I also ask you publicly announce this investigation in order to discourage any potential violations of ethics rules by Mr. Lutnick or other members of the administration. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

I wondered if any lawmakers, many of whom (from both parties) are big fans of Tesla stock, took Lutnick’s advice. Since his March 19 comments, several of them have done Tesla transactions from Capitol Hill.

The buyers include Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.). Greene purchased up to $15,000 on April 8 and again on May 5. While Bresnahan’s purchase of up to $15,000 in Tesla shares on April 8 are notable, he also sold as much as $15,000 on March 31. A week before Lutnick’s comments, Bresnahan sold up to $30,000 of Tesla in two separate transactions.

Other Tesla sellers include Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), who dumped up to $15,000 the same day as Lutnick’s Fox News appearance (though he owns considerably more shares in the EV company). Rep. Gil Cisneros (D-Calif.), who prior to becoming a politician won the Mega Millions Lottery, sold as much as $15,000 in Tesla shares on March 31.

Gottheimer, Greene, and Bresnahan are some of Congress’s most active traders these days. The lack of Tesla purchases following Lutnick’s on-air recommendation indicates that lawmakers, who often play the market with greater success than the world’s leading hedge funds, didn’t put much stock in the commerce secretary’s claims about the wisdom of buying the Tesla dip.

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