Back in 2025, Donald Trump created controversy by accepting a gifted jet—a “gift” that may have cost American taxpayers up to a billion dollars to ready—from Qatar. This week, he put it into service for the first time: flying it to North Dakota for the dedication of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, with the jet slated to lead a Fourth of July flyover days later.
MS NOW explains:
The jet is meant to serve as a “bridge,” easing the strain on aging aircraft until two purpose-built planes enter service in 2028, the administration official and the Air Force spokesperson said. Trump has said that once he leaves office, the jet will be donated to his presidential library. …
Just weeks before the president announced the gift, the Trump Organization announced a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar in “collaboration” with a Saudi company and a firm owned by the Qatari government. ...
“The president time and time again makes clear that he is willing to [accept] and actively seeking gifts from foreign governments where the American people have significant national security interests, and Qatar is perhaps the most glaring and tangible example of that,” [said] Donald Sherman, president of the government ethics watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics.
It’s hard to keep track of Trump’s various scandals, controversies, and self-dealing (although we at the Executive Watch desk do our best to help with this!). He has so utterly flooded the zone with improprieties that episodes like this one barely register. Indeed, a sequence like this—Qatar’s $400 million jet “gift” arriving weeks after the Trump Organization signed its own deal with Qatari-linked money—might have been a crisis moment for a past administration. For this one, it’s par for the course.
The Constitution, for what it’s worth, specifically provides that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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