What The Hell America!

SAY WHAT YOU WILL about MAGA podcasters and influencers and the media owners making humiliating moves to stay on Donald Trump’s good side, but actual reporters by and large are doing their jobs and informing the public. The same can’t be said of the Republican Congress. There’s no outrage dark or damaging enough to spur it to action. It is an epic, ongoing institutional failure.

The latest test for U.S. leaders came early Sunday morning when ABC News revealed that Trump is getting a $400 million gift from Qatar: A “palace in the sky” for use while he’s in the White House and then later at his planned presidential library.

So what’s the big deal? It’s not like we didn’t know Trump was transactional, even when the transactions are illegal and/or unconstitutional. The corruption back in his first term seemed huge—most obviously the foreign, federal, and state officials, lobbyists, cronies, allies, job seekers, and even pardon recipients who swelled Trump’s income by patronizing his Trump International Hotel near the White House. Later House Democratic investigations showed, for instance, that six nations had spent over $750,000 at that single hotel while trying to influence foreign policy, and that the hotel had even “extracted . . . exorbitant rates” from the U.S. Secret Service.

That blatant profit center triggered three 2017 lawsuits claiming that Trump was accepting unconstitutional payments because the Constitution does say, after all, that officeholders can’t accept “emoluments,” as in gifts or money from foreign and state governments and leaders, as well as our own federal government, without the consent of Congress. The Supreme Court declined to hear one of the cases and, after the 2020 election, with its habitual fawning deference to Trump, granted his request to dismiss the other two as moot.

THUS DID THE SUPREME COURT set the stage for this year’s ongoing, unchecked festival of domestic and foreign corruption. Dinner with Trump for top buyers of $TRUMP crypto coins, spurring millions in purchases. Multiple nations courting and committing to Trump Organization projects. An invitation-only, $500,000-per member Executive Branch club cofounded by Donald Trump Jr., opening soon in Georgetown. Talks that might lead to the Trumps taking back control of their first-term hotel in the federally owned Old Post Office Building (it’s been a Waldorf Astoria since they sold their leasing rights in 2022.) The palatial Qatar plane fit for a king.

And that’s a tiny fraction of a long list. “The corruption is brazen,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Cal.), posted on social media after ABC News broke the luxury plane story. Yet the brazenness is Trump’s cover, at least in his mind. The plane gift is perfectly aboveboard, the president said, a “very public and transparent transaction.”

Not quite. News of the overtly unconstitutional gift was under wraps until it was leaked. But let’s leave that aside, along with the fact that less than two weeks ago, the Trump Organization signed a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar—a deal that involves a company owned by the Qatari government.

The real question is: what are congressional Republicans going to do about it?

Some conservatives and MAGA figures are worried, but uncomfortable issues like bribery and constitutional violations have not come up much. Most of them are raising safety and security concerns based on mistrust of Qatar. And even on the slight chance that some GOP congressional leaders would attempt hearings on those issues, they would be likely too late or feeble to put a stop to the bestowing of the sky palace. Alternatively, as Bill Kristol noted Monday, Trump could ask his allies in Congress to make an exception—it’s allowed!—for this very special plane. That would be an interesting vote.

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HERE’S AN IDEA FOR DEMOCRATS: Next time they are in the House majority, hopefully in January 2027, they should revive the “weaponization of the federal government” subcommittee created by Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan in 2023 (which, shockingly, vanished when a GOP president took power). Trump is already targeting and punishing colleges, students, law firms, media organizations, and federal employees if he doesn’t like what they’re saying or doing.

Call Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about how that can possibly be constitutional. Call her and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to testify about how Trump’s $400 million flying palace can possibly be constitutional. Because they have said it’s fine, and they are known to be independent, principled thinkers devoted to truth and the Constitution.

Just kidding! Bondi is not only a former lobbyist for Qatar, she’s a former Florida attorney general who decided not to pursue fraud complaints against Trump University after Trump in 2013 made a $25,000 contribution (illegal, as it turned out) to a group supporting her re-election. Hegseth, suffice it to say, has demonstrated he is not overly concerned with national security or constitutional concepts like equal protection and non-discrimination.

But I’m not kidding about inviting them in to testify, perhaps for eleven hours apiece to a hostile panel, like Hillary Clinton did in 2015 when she was secretary of state and Republicans were trying (fruitlessly) to blame her for the deadly U.S. embassy shooting in Benghazi, Libya.

A couple of colleagues and I must have been in a relatively light, hopeful mood just before Trump was inaugurated for the first time in 2017. With fingers crossed, we wrote him a short, simple Cliffs Notes Constitution—and after stating the emoluments rules in conversational English, we joked, “Bummer.”

We should have foreseen the outcome. The Founders’ warnings about emoluments—and everything else—were tossed onto Trump’s raging first-term bonfire of rules, laws, oaths, and constitutional edicts. Now, less than four months into Trump’s second four years, the heat is already unbearable.