President Trump has returned from his Middle East tour after a week glad-handing sheikhs, signing $2 trillion worth of investment deals and dancing to the YMCA in Riyadh. These festivities were accompanied by major policy shifts — from lifting all sanctions on Syria to Trump declaring in a speech that the days of “western interventionalists flying in with lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs” are over.
Yet here in Washington, all anyone can really talk about is the $400 million Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet the Qataris have offered the Americans. “Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our Country,” Trump declared on Truth Social as he got on with his tour. He wants it to be his new Air Force One. Previous recipients of similar Qatari gifts have so far included President Erdogan of Turkey (2018) and Saddam Hussein (2000).
The fallout has temporarily united appalled Democrats (the party’s Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, described the gift as “bribery”) with old-school Republicans and parts of the Maga movement (who worry Trump is getting too cosy with a country that hosted Hamas).
In the Pentagon, aides are wincing at the potential costs of retrofitting and security-checking the plane. “You’d have to strip it out,” said a figure privy to conversations. “This is not just like, ‘Oh we’ll do a nice paint job’.”
Yet away from the noise — and potential legal issues (even though the attorney-general, Pam Bondi, who worked as a lobbyist representing the Qatari government, says there aren’t any), the plane row also offers a window into the president’s approach to foreign policy.
It’s a bright, shiny object that violates all known precedents, doesn’t shrink from upsetting his base and — best of all — keeps everyone talking about and guessing at his ultimate plan long after his tour of the Middle East is over.
“I will give them credit for credit due. They pulled off a trip for the ages,” said Joel Rubin, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in the Obama administration. “The meshing of the personal, the political and the financial. The mega gifts. It was a great show … but as to whether it will be sustained beyond next week: who knows?”
The 747 is the latest reminder of how transactional second-term Trump is: the real-estate president looking for deals. One of the most striking aspects of the visit has been the focus on bilateral relations between the US and each of the countries, with deals ranging from a $142 billion defence contract with Saudi Arabia to the Qataris ordering 160 Boeing planes. Compared with previous trips, there was relatively little conversation about regional security architecture, missile defence or Iran.
“Trump doesn’t have a philosophy or a strategy,” John Bolton, who was national security adviser in Trump’s first administration, told me. “This was a very transactional visit.”
A plugged-in member of Maga world said: “What you need to understand is Trump and his team tend to think the answer to world peace is that everyone needs an apartment, air-conditioning and — ideally — a swimming pool. So there is money to be made, but also another upside.”
This language of deals is one that Arab leaders seem to prefer to some of the moralising talk in the past about western values. “They still wince at how snooty and patronising the Brits are,” an intermediary said. “They like the new US style: it’s direct, it’s friendly, it’s transactional.” Almost regal.
But many traditional Republicans harbour deep concerns about the policy shift. They fret about Trump ending sanctions on Syria. They worry that US national interest is being supplanted by business deals — with a closeness to Qatar a particular concern. They fear that abdicating the familiar US role in Middle Eastern affairs will mean abandoning allies, or creating vacuums for Iran or Russia.
But the Maga pro-America isolationists can’t get enough. “There was always a pretty harsh streak of realism in US policy,” said Anatol Lieven at the Quincy Institute in DC. “But to have dropped so completely the language of America leading the world to democracy and freedom and the rules-based order? That’s pretty striking. And it has, of course, had practical effects.”
Trump’s enthusiasm for the plane also shows how willing he is to embrace solutions to problems (in this case the tired condition of the current presidential aircraft, and also decades of stalemate in the world’s most combustible region) that others might not even have imagined.
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Trump’s strategy in the Middle East is likely to be informed by the experience of Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, who received $2 billion from the Saudi Public Investment Fund into his private equity firm in 2021, shortly after the Trumps left the White House for the first time (in a deal that has also been widely criticised for perceived conflicts of interest).
Kushner came to know the Gulf’s new generation of leaders and concluded that the powerbrokers — particularly Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia — are less ideologically invested in the Palestinian cause than their predecessors. They no longer saw Israel as the enemy. The Kushner school of read-the-room diplomacy led in Trump’s first term to the Abraham Accords, under which four Muslim nations have now recognised Israel.
“What Trump realised — that the Washington elite didn’t — through his family’s business dealings is that it’s wrong to think you can only have peace in the Middle East by resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This was the received wisdom, the only thing you’d be taught in university programmes,” said Paul du Quenoy, president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute, a Florida-based advocacy group that promotes constitutional liberties.
How ever Trump got to this point, even Democrats are now looking on in something approaching admiration. As Obama’s security aide Ben Rhodes put it on a podcast: “I don’t like Trump’s motivations for lots of things he does. But one thing you will say is he’s not tied to this constant fear of some bad-faith right-wing attacks or stupid blob-type [for instance a civil servant] saying, ‘We don’t do this, we must leverage the sanctions for blah blah blah’.”
As mentioned though, the plane and the general geopolitical offensive have upset many in Trump’s party.
Does the president need to worry about what Republicans think?
It’s starting to matter more: especially as he tries to push his giant tax-and-spending bill through Congress. At a dinner I attended in the Capitol to mark the 50th anniversary of the Laffer Curve economic model, Mike Johnson, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, appeared to hint at backbench unhappiness. “I’m not really a Speaker of the House. I’m really like a mental-health counsellor. And I did a lot of that today,” he told guests, after a day negotiating with old-school Republicans over Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill. It was blocked by House Republican spending hawks on Friday.
Lastly, the plane also reflects Trump’s growing interest in his presidential legacy.
Trump recently dampened speculation that he would try for an unconstitutional third term in 2028, although he then revived it in remarks to US troops in Qatar on Thursday.
But in a sign that he is thinking about life beyond the White House he recently mocked Barack Obama’s “disaster” of a presidential library that is under development in Chicago. The talk is that Trump plans to make his own library bigger and better than any predecessor’s but Ronald Reagan’s library boasts a decommissioned Air Force One (Trump debated in front of it during the 2016 Republican primaries).
Enter the Qataris.
“He’s wanted the new Air Force One since his first term. But the advantage here is he gets a flying palace,” said Bolton. “First, it’s transferred to the Department of Defense. Then they transfer it to his presidential library.”
The Qatari 747, according to those in Trump’s inner circle, is a good deal for the American people (it’s free!) and can then become a lasting symbol of his presidency.
But the bigger prize spoken of by his team is world peace. They’re being quite serious. Trump has previously complained about his lack of a Nobel peace prize but may now feel that the award is within his grasp. His recent treatment of Binyamin Netanyahu (Bolton says he “excluded Israel from the trip”) shows his willingness to play hardball for a bigger goal.
As Trump said when imploring Iran to make a deal: “I don’t like permanent enemies.” That’s also a warning that he might not like permanent friends either.
The unspoken message to Netanyahu was that if he didn’t go along with the new strategy — building ties between Israel and Arab states, rather than fixating on the Palestinian issue — then Trump would sideline him and deal directly with other regional leaders. “Trump is saying to Bibi: you need to work with me — be prepared to give something back to the US,” a diplomatic insider said. “Trump has basically reset the table and said, well, these are the priorities. I mean, if you don’t get it, Bibi, well, lose my number, I have other friends.”
If Saudi Arabia were to normalise relations with Israel, it would be a significant win for Trump’s strategy. This may force Netanyahu to adopt a more pragmatic, less hardline posture in response. For now, Trump has made bold moves and will wait to see what comes back. Perhaps from the comfort of his new presidential plane.
