Corruption and a Security Catastrophe in Plane Sight

Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:

I will admit that as a presidential historian and national security nerd one of my first thoughts last November after Donald Trump won office was, “Ugh” — I used a stronger word in my mind at the time — “he’s going to get to mess with Air Force One again, isn’t he?” 

At the time, I was mostly thinking about his atrocious paint scheme.

Like often, it turns out I wasn’t thinking crazily enough. 

President Trump has had a strange obsession with Air Force One ever since he first came to office. There is, of course, no single “Air Force One” — as anyone who watched the Harrison Ford movie knows, the call sign belongs to any air force plane carrying the president. Ditto for Marine One helicopters and the old Army One helicopter fleet — the Marines and Army used to alternate helicopter support — and the one time there’s ever been a “Navy One,” when George W. Bush flew aboard an S-3 Viking en route to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to give his “Mission Accomplished” speech.

Yet since he first became president, Trump — who is used to flying on a gaudy 757 owned by the Trump Organization — has wanted the president to have a fancier plane. He’s frustrated with a long-delayed Boeing effort to upgrade the presidential 747 fleet to newer planes—planes he wants decorated with a paint scheme that foregoes the iconic blue-and-white design by Raymond Loewy and Jackie Kennedy in favor of red, white, and blue paint that just, totally coincidentally surely, looks pretty similar to his Trump Organization paint scheme. He loves it so much he keeps a model of the plane on the table in the Oval Office:

President Biden had originally reversed the selfish, ahistorical paint decision in 2023, and gone with a more traditional coloring, but Boeing’s been so tardy getting the planes ready that now Trump has a second opportunity to mess with the still-far-from-ready project—and he’s extra frustrated because the planes are so far behind schedule they may not be ready during his presidency at all.

And that leads us to yesterday’s forehead-smacking news that ABC News broke: Trump appears set to accept a “gift” of a half-billion-dollar 747-B luxury plane — a “palace in the skies” people touted yesterday! — from, of all people and places, the Qatari government.

But that’s not all: Trump also plans to keep the plane after he leaves office, with the plane being given then to the Trump Presidential Foundation, an entity that appears to be increasingly less about his legacy and more serves as his open-for-business slush fund for pay-offs and bribes.

This “gift” is wildly corrupt, even by Trumpian standards. The idea that a foreign government could “gift” a half-billion-dollar plane to the Pentagon through some sleight of hand that then becomes the personal toy of an ex-president when he leaves office is absolutely absurd from an ethics standpoint and clearly unconstitutional vis-à-vis the so-called “emoluments clause,” which Trump has already severely bent in his first term. Specifically, Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution prohibits individuals holding a “public office” or “office of profit or trust” in the federal government from accepting gifts, emoluments, offices, or titles from foreign governments or monarchs without the explicit consent of Congress.

The braintrust of Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth have apparently come up with some legal interpretation that says this foreign gift is definitely absolutely not a foreign gift, that the United States government is totally happy and able to accept a half-billion gift from a foreign country that we would turn around and give to a president for his personal use when he’s done in office.

American media utterly failed yesterday in explaining the sheer illegality, unconstitutional and corrupt nature of this deal. Axios’ morning article today is an embarrassing and breezy summary, little more than official White House stenography, that makes this sound like business as usual — in fact, the article doesn’t raise any ethical or constitutional concerns at all and makes it sound like Donald Trump is begrudgingly doing the American people and Qatar a favor by accepting it.

The New York Times is little better. Their headline online was terrible, and their bullet points in their morning newsletter frame the “ethical concerns” in Trump’s own words, blaming Democrats as “losers” for even raising them:

Maybe if the Qataris had tried to buy some of Hunter Biden’s artwork instead the US media would have been able to work up the appropriate outrage lather.

A little media criticism aside: Both of these articles are good examples of how the media “both sides’s” Trump’s corruption—making criticism of his corruption the “problem” of Democrats and crunchy “good government” losers alone and completely skipping over any agency or responsibility of others in and around government to object. How about, for instance, a headline like: “No Republican Senator Objects to Trump Accepting Half-Billion-Dollar Bribe”? 

The corruption bothers me a great deal, but I want to talk today about a different reason the gift boggles the mind: The national security risk.

To put the president of the United States on a plane built and owned by a foreign country for over a decade is the definition of insanity, the assumption of catastrophic and literally unquantifiable risk in an arena where the U.S. devotes billions of dollars a year to mitigating even the slightest, remotest risk to presidential security and communication.

The specific plane in question is a 747-8 known as P4-HBJ, which has been used by the government of Qatar since the early 2010s to fly its ruling family and government leaders.

While much is uncertain right now, the New York Times reports that the Qatari plane could be modified by a Texas contractor and upgraded to Air Force One-style “military capabilities” by the end of the year — an impossibly short timeline for anyone who knows the slightest bit about the complexities of presidential communications and security systems.

(For instance: I wrote a story back in 2017 about the complexity of replacing the Marine One helicopter fleet, a program that also was billions over budget and years behind schedule due to the how advanced and fancy these one-of-a-kind helicopters are. President Biden only rode in the new one for the first time last year, and the whole transition is only scheduled to be complete by 2030.)

Now I spent much of the 2010s writing a book on continuity of government and the great lengths that the United States goes to protecting the president — the very name of this newsletter comes from my years of work reporting on various Doomsday Scenarios — and to realize just how insane the president’s idea is, you have to understand the extreme lengths the U.S. takes to secure the commander-in-chief wherever he goes.

In fact, the full security bubble around a president is literally impossible to quantify, since so much of it is classified, but we know that it involves at least five levels of airborne protection.

The Boeing 747 commonly used as Air Force One itself is a 40-year-old and increasingly unreliable, specially designed, heavily-secured, American-made airplane with classified defensive capabilities that likely include electronic warfare, anti-missile, and high-performance tweaks. (There are two of these planes, officially known as VC-25s, the military’s designation.)

Then, when the president travels, we also fly a backup plane—either the other VC-25 or one of the blue-and-white Boeing 757s, known as C-32s, typically used by the vice president or secretary of state. Wherever the president travels, as needed, the military also sends the green-and-white helicopters known as Marine One. This, in and of itself, is an extraordinary effort: The United States is the only country in the world that provides full helicopter lift capability to its head of state when traveling abroad. (To put that another way: Every other country’s head of state flies on the host nation’s helicopters when he or she travels abroad.)

But the airborne protection doesn’t end there. Then there’s all the stuff that the US government doesn’t talk about or acknowledge. Overseas, when the president travels, the U.S. also typically deploys one of the presidential “Doomsday aircraft,” the Boeing E4-B planes, also modified 747s, officially known as the National Airborne Operations Center. These planes, traditionally based at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, are specially designed to run nuclear war from the sky for up to three days continuously before being forced to land.

And there’s still more: Traditionally, the U.S. has also relied upon a secret fleet of unacknowledged planes — smaller unmarked Gulfstream jets — that are positioned at alternative airports close to the president’s destinations that could serve as emergency backup evacuation options. For decades, this secret fleet of presidential planes — known as C-20s — could be used to land on runways half the length of the larger presidential aircraft and, specifically, had the precise landing requirements of the 5,100-foot runway at the hidden private runway adjacent to the presidential bunker at Mount Weather in Berryville, Virginia.

The idea of putting at the center of all of those rings of protection and secure communications a plane that has been under the control of a foreign government for more than a decade is unconscionable, both from a counterintelligence perspective and from a physical security perspective.

To even begin to mitigate that risk, from an eavesdropping, tracking, cybersecurity, or sabotage standpoint would involve stripping the plane down to the equivalent of the studs — but even then, I wouldn’t put a US president on that plane. Any decent foreign intelligence agency would, in fact, assume that you would strip the plane to the studs and so would work to hide any eavesdropping, tracking, or sabotage exploit somewhere you wouldn’t be able to strip it away easily.

And today’s planes offer a lot of opportunities for hiding things—even before you get into talking about physical vulnerabilities or tracking devices. Planes today are effectively flying computers. The Boeing 787 and Boeing 777 have millions of lines of code; the Boeing 747, being older, has fewer—perhaps only in the hundreds of thousands of code—but how much those matter was illustrated by the two crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX, which, experts say, happened because the plane lacked eight specific lines of computer code.

Sure, we’d scrub and upgrade the new plane’s computers, etc., etc., but the entire “end of the year” timeline all-but screams “We’re going to cut a lot of corners to have this plane ready for Donald Trump’s whims.”

Moreover, Trump’s obvious obsession with the idea that this plane represents a “palace in the sky” indicates that he’s going to push to keep as much of the already-installed luxury as possible, increasingly the risk profile and so-called “attack surface.” Do you really think he’s going to inherit a plane outfitted for a literal emir and then be okay with replacing everything inside with standard government-issue chairs and toilets?

If you were the Secret Service and the Air Force, how would you ever feel comfortable knowing that you had done all you could to mitigate the risks of a president flying on this plane? Why as a nation would we ever accept this risk? Trump’s been known to be interested in this plane since he reviewed it at Palm Beach in February, so it’s not even merely the “friendly” intelligence services of Qatar that we should be concerned about—every friendly and adversary intelligence service worth its salt surely has been looking for months now to get aboard that plane.

And, again, that’s leaving aside that this “gift” is the single most nakedly corrupt foreign gift to a U.S. president in history — and everyone, everywhere can see that, no matter how much Trump, Bondi, or Hegseth tries to pretend otherwise.

One thing to watch: Now that Donald Trump has set the ante for the Gulf states at a half-billion-dollar gift by the Qataris, what might we see in the days and months ahead “gifted” by the Saudis or Emiratis?

A month ago, I wrote that the El Salvador CECOT scandal — which is still unfolding with mixed results — was one of those red lines where once we’re disappearing people to foreign torture gulags “there’s almost no other red line worth stopping at between democracy and full-blown authoritarianism.”

This feels like another of those red lines: Once a foreign government can openly give the president a half-billion-dollar plane as a personal gift, there’s no red line left between a democracy and a full-blown kleptocracy. I hope the coming news cycles will see this “gift” unravel, but I’m not optimistic.

GMG

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