Here’s How Much Trump’s “Free” Qatar Private Jet Will Cost Americans

There’s no such thing as a free plane.

Donald Trump has claimed that he is receiving a “free, very expensive plane” from the Qatari royal family—but while it may be free to him, it will be very expensive to the American taxpayer, according to Politico.

The Qatari Defense Ministry is currently considering transferring a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet to replace Air Force One, which would be one of the largest gifts from a foreign government to a U.S. president ever. While the plane has the same base model as others used to transport the president, this plane wouldn’t be ready to fly day one; it would require costly modifications.

“This isn’t really a gift,” Connecticut Representative Joe Courtney, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, told Politico. He warned that the jumbo jet would have to be completely rebuilt by the Department of Defense.

“You’d basically have to tear the plane down to the studs and rebuild it to meet all the survivability, security and communications requirements of Air Force One. It’s a massive undertaking—and an unfunded one at that.”

The plane would need to be outfitted with self-defense technology and electromagnetic shielding.

Former Air Force acquisitions chief Andrew Hunter told Politico that this massive, unfunded undertaking could end up costing a pretty penny. “The cost of a retrofit like this would likely be on the order of a heavy maintenance cycle for a VC-25A, which is in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.

Hunter noted that there would also need to be a complete security sweep of the plane’s software that could end up costing tens of millions. “That’s not a trivial thing to do,” he said.

Maintaining the plane could also prove expensive. According to a 2021 estimate from the Pentagon, each VC-25B plane costs more than $2.5 billion and will cost a projected $7.7 billion for long-term operations and support costs over the next 30 years.

Trump has claimed that the plane will be “decommissioned” into his Presidential Library Foundation at the end of his term.

The gargantuan gift has summoned criticism from Democrats and Trump’s usual critics, but even his far-right allies are infuriated by the blatant show of corruption. Receiving a luxury plane from Qatar looks like a bribe, especially considering the Trump family business’s recent deal to build a luxury golf resort in the Gulf nation.

Trump is replacing the first Black librarian of Congress with his own personal lawyer.

The Justice Department on Monday announced that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead defense lawyer in his Stormy Daniels hush-money case, will be acting librarian of Congress. Blanche will replace Dr. Carla Hayden, who held the position since 2016 until she was fired on Friday.

The White House blamed Hayden’s firing on her support for DEI.

“We felt she did not fit the needs of the American people,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters. “There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” The Librarian of Congress is a research position, not a book-lending position. Hayden was not handing out “woke” books to children. She was leading the “Of the People”campaign, which aimed to showcase works from Black, indigenous, Hispanic or Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander and other communities of color in the library collections.

Donald Trump made it easier to deport Afghans on the same day that he welcomed white South African “refugees” arriving in the country.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced Monday that the government is ending the temporary protected status for Afghanistan, putting the legal residency of 9,000 Afghans in the U.S. in jeopardy. Noem claimed in a statement that conditions in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan have improved enough for TPS for Afghans to expire on May 20, with the program being terminated on July 12.

“Afghanistan has had an improved security situation, and its stabilizing economy no longer prevent them from returning to their home country,” Noem’s statement reads. “Additionally, the termination furthers the national interest as DHS records indicate that there are recipients who have been under investigation for fraud and threatening our public safety and national security.”

President Biden extended TPS to Afghans after the Taliban took over Afghanistan following the U.S. military withdrawal from the country in 2021. Tens of thousands of Afghan refugees, many of whom worked with the U.S. military, subsequently arrived stateside. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would not renew temporary protections for Afghans in the United States.

The Trump administration has considered one exception to its plan to deport Afghan refugees: Christians, who potentially face persecution if they return to the country. But that’s of little comfort to Afghans of various faiths who face an uncertain and dangerous future if they are deported to the hard-line authoritarian country, especially if they worked with U.S. forces.

“What the administration has done today is betray people who risked their lives for America, built lives here, and believed in our promises,” nonprofit group #AfghanEvac, which helps resettle Afghan families in the U.S., posted on X on Monday.

The move comes on the same day that the Trump administration is welcoming white Afrikaner “refugees” from South Africa while continuing to ban most other refugees. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said Monday that the Afrikaners were admitted because they could be “assimilated easily” into the U.S., a racist confirmation that the administration sees white South Africans as preferable to Black and brown immigrants.

Afghan refugees reading the news on Monday will likely feel betrayed by the U.S., especially those who put their lives on the line to assist the U.S. military during its two-decade presence in Afghanistan. It seems that the only threat they pose to “national security and public safety” is being the wrong race or following the wrong religion for the Trump administration.

Two men claiming to be Trump appointees were denied entry to the U.S. Copyright Office Monday.

The men arrived at the internal Library of Congress agency with a document claiming to be agency officials as appointed by the White House, reported Wired. They claimed to be Brian Nieves, a new deputy librarian, and Paul Perkins, a new acting director of the office as well as acting registrar, a source told the publication. “It is unclear whether the men accurately identified themselves,” Wired noted.

The document the two men referred to also specified that deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former defense attorney for Donald Trump, was the acting librarian of Congress.

The men were not allowed in by Capitol Police, a source told the publication, though the law enforcement agency rejected that anyone had been denied entry or escorted out.

Individuals with those names currently work in the federal government. Nieves serves as the deputy chief of staff at the office of the deputy attorney general, while Perkins is an associate deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice, their LinkedIn profiles reveal.

The attempted entry came two days after Trump fired Shira Perlmutter, the director of the Copyright Office. Perlmutter had served in the role since October 2020, but her exit came one day after the agency published a 108-page “pre-publication” report questioning the legality of utilizing copyrighted materials to train artificial intelligence.

Copyright lawyers who spoke with Wired described the report—and its premature release—as outside the norm for the agency. But the report’s determination was highly anticipated, as growth in Silicon Valley currently rests on the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and its ability to steal information from publishers, news outlets, artists, musicians, and countless other professions.

The nation’s Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden also received the boot earlier last week. She was the first woman and the first Black person to serve in the role. Speaking with reporters Friday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed Hayden’s removal on the librarian’s “pursuit of DEI” and for “putting inappropriate books in the library for children,” claiming that Hayden’s appointment “did not fit the needs of the American people.

Both Hayden and Perlmutter had faced scrutiny by conservatives, including the nonprofit government oversight group American Accountability Foundation, which had called for their dismissal.

“The President and his team have done an admirable and long-needed job cleaning out deep state liberals from the federal government. It is time they show Carla Hayden and Shira Perlmutter the door and return an America First agenda to the nation’s intellectual property regulation,” AAF’s president Tom Jones told the Daily Mail last month.

People spent an estimated $148 million on Donald Trump’s meme coin in a contest to dine with the president at his private golf club in Sterling, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., later this month. 

Reuters reports that Trump will host the top 220 holders of his cryptocurrency at a gala dinner on May 22, which he marketed as the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the world.” The top 25 buyers will get an “ultra-exclusive private VIP reception” and “Special VIP Tour” with the president. 

The contest to dine with the president resulted in the top 220 holdings amounting to $147,586,796.41. The holders of Trump’s coin include companies based in places such as Singapore and Hong Kong.  

The top wallet, holding close to $18.5 million of coin, is called “SUN” and is held by a Seychelles-based crypto exchange known as HTX. Justin Sun, a Chinese national accused of fraud known for spending $6.2 million on a banana and then eating it, is on HTX’s board and already has a financial relationship with Trump. 

Sun said he invested $75 million into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, after the 2024 election. He was then fortunate enough to have Securities and Exchange Commission charges dropped against him in February. 

Not all have been so lucky. Trump announced the $TRUMP coin on the weekend of his inauguration in January, and since then, 592,962 cryptocurrency wallets, most of its investors, have lost a combined $3.9 billion.

It’s quite evident that Trump’s meme coin has been a vessel for corruption for the president, allowing millions of dollars in foreign money to flow freely into his and his family’s pockets. Every time the president makes a policy decision or even speaks about cryptocurrency, it causes the value of his coin to go up. Trump is openly flaunting corruption as president, and only congressional Democrats are saying anything, with the little power they have. 

“The Trump meme coin is the single most corrupt act ever committed by a president,” Senator Chris Murphy told Reuters in a statement on Friday. “Donald Trump is essentially posting his Venmo for any billionaire CEO or foreign oligarch to cash in some favors by secretly sending him millions of dollars.”

An administration official’s attempt to explain Donald Trump’s decision to allow white South African “refugees” as an exception to his ban on asylum-seekers revealed just how racist the policy really is. 

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau was greeting the group of 59 Afrikaners who arrived in Washington Monday, when he told a reporter that Afrikaners had received an exception to the president’s order because they could be “assimilated easily” into the United States. 

The reporter had asked why Trump had chosen to prioritize Afrikaners, white descendants of mainly Dutch colonizers in South Africa, over other refugees from countries such as Afghanistan. 

Landau explained that Trump’s ban on virtually all refugees “was subject, from the very beginning, to exceptions where it was determined that this would be in the interest of the United States.

“One of, some of the criteria are making sure that refugees did not pose any challenge to our national security, and that they could be assimilated easily into our country,” Landau said. 

The deputy secretary’s language indicates that the Trump administration is willing to admit  refugees who are more culturally and ethnically cohesive with the predominantly white U.S. population.

Trump has repeatedly attempted to blow up perceived cultural differences between U.S. citizens and immigrants as a basis for installing blatantly racist immigration policies. 

Laundau’s comments come just months after Trump and his campaign team attempted to smear Haitian immigrant populations, baselessly claiming that a group of refugees in Springfield, Ohio, had begun cooking up their neighbors’ pets. JD Vance even targeted the children of undocumented immigrants across the country for not being fluent in English, claiming they were a strain on the American education system—which the administration obviously cares so much about, given that they gutted the federal agency that funds it.

In reality, Haitian migrants in Springfield created an economic revival in the struggling industrial city, and local officials in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, another of the towns Trump had targeted with racist smears, insisted that Trump was lying and that the language barrier for immigrant students was not an issue. 

Trump’s blatantly racist rhetoric has gone on to inform his administration’s sinister immigration agenda, which seeks to strip immigrants, both documented and undocumented, of their legal protections and deport or exile them to foreign countries. 

In short, any claims about wanting to ease assimilation are just as pathetic as Trump’s claims about immigrants eating cats and dogs.

Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency scheme is leaving a bad taste in the mouths of some of his biggest supporters.

Speaking on his podcast Monday, far-right influencer and The Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro called on the president to “stop,” openly questioning how Trump’s meme coin grift could be considered good for America, rather than just good for his pockets.

“It just isn’t America first in any conceivable way,” Shapiro said.

Last month, Trump announced a competition to see who could obtain the highest average Trumpcoin balance within a three-week period. That period ended Monday, with the top 220 reportedly winning a private dinner at Trump National Golf Club in Washington with the president.

The top 25 investors in TRUMP tokens are eligible to receive VIP access to the dinner event, opening the opportunity for them to take photos alongside Trump and receive a guided tour of the property the following day. As of last week, 19 of the top 25 holders registered on the meme coin site used foreign exchanges that exclude U.S.-based customers, reported Bloomberg. That means—as Shapiro deduced—that “foreigners are buying a lot of meme coin and then getting meetings with President Trump.

“This raises the question of influence peddling,” Shapiro continued. “If you basically buy a bunch of Trump meme coin and then funnel money to organizations associated with President Trump so you can have dinner with Trump. That doesn’t look great.”

Shapiro also chastised Trump for recently accepting several gifts that could be interpreted as foreign bribes, including a super luxury jumbo jet from Qatar—one of the most lavish gifts ever bestowed to a U.S. president.

“Does any of this help advance the president’s agenda?” Shapiro continued. “You know the agenda that we all voted for, the agenda we want to see implemented. Does this make his presidency stronger or weaker? Now I’m gonna repeat again, I don’t know whether this activity is criminal in any way, but things do not have to be criminal to hurt the agenda.

“Why in the world would President Trump be well served by this sort of vulnerability? Again, more importantly, why would those of us who voted for him, who gave to his campaign, who stumped for him, campaigned for him, be well served by this? The answer is we aren’t, and that’s why it needs to stop,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro isn’t the only MAGA talking head to come down hard on their political leader for accepting the plane. Earlier Monday, Laura Loomer went scorched earth on Trump, damning his acceptance of the jet as a “$400 million ‘gift’ from jihadists in suits.”

Non-MAGA critics of Trump’s cryptocurrency have flagged the investment as a novel way to circumnavigate Federal Election Commission contribution limits, which prevent individuals from donating more than $3,500 per election to their candidate of choice.

Trump has tried to position himself as a pro-crypto president. At a bitcoin conference in Nashville in July, Trump promised to build out a “strategic national bitcoin reserve” if elected, according to CoinDesk.

But others have derided the memecoin as little more than another money-grabbing grift. Trump’s long list of election-year hustles included launching a remarkably ugly sneaker and a limited-edition $60 God Bless the USA Bible co-promoted by “God Bless the USA” singer Lee Greenwood. Trump also took the parent company of his social media platform Truth Social public and stamped his name on a new cryptocurrency platform headed by his two sons, Eric and Don Jr., that even the president’s allies have criticized as a “huge mistake.”

The Episcopal Church is refusing to help the Trump administration resettle white South African “refugees,” ending a decades-long collaboration with the U.S. government on refugee resettlement.

The church’s Episcopal Migration Ministries have historically worked with the government via grants to resettle refugees fleeing persecution.

“In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step. Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government,” said Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe, in a statement on Monday.

This comes as 49 Afrikaners arrived in the United States on Monday as “refugees.” President Trump gave them priority status, which means they waited no more than three months for their resettlement. Many refugees from other countries are forced to wait 18 to 24 months, and sometimes even years, for their resettlement assignment. Trump banned virtually all other refugees on his first day in office, including people fleeing active war zones like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and others.

White South Africans have made unsubstantiated claims of reverse racism and genocide, which have been echoed by Trump.

“It’s a genocide that’s taking place. Farmers are being killed. They happen to be white,” he said on Monday.

House Republicans are already opposing House Speaker Mike Johnson’s budget proposal stripping health care coverage from millions of Americans—but not for the reason you think.

Texas Representative Chip Roy was outraged Monday by the House Republicans’ new budget proposal, which included $880 million in cuts largely to Medicaid, not because they were too big but because they weren’t big enough.

“I sure hope House & Senate leadership are coming up with a backup plan …. because I’m not here to rack up an additional $20 trillion in debt over 10 years or to subsidize healthy, able-bodied adults, corrupt blue states, and monopoly hospital ceos …” he wrote on X. Roy is policy chair of the House Freedom Caucus, which has been vocal in advocating massive cuts.

Utah Senator Mike Lee replied to Roy in agreement:. “🎯” he wrote.

The budget proposal would strip Medicaid from an estimated 8.6 million people over the next decade, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The cuts would come primarily due to work requirements—a minimum of 80 hours per month for able-bodied adults—as well as a requirement to verify eligibility twice a year, rather than once.

But not every Republican is pushing for more significant cuts to Medicaid. Earlier this month, 12 GOP lawmakers wrote a letter to Johnson writing that they would “not support a final reconciliation bill that includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations,” according to Axios.

Roy had pushed for large cuts to Medicaid while supporting the White House budget proposal released earlier this month, which would cut a whopping $163 billion in federal spending next fiscal year by eliminating programs on climate, education, health, and housing.

“Combined with our joint efforts to rescind additional wasteful spending, and deliver a reconciliation bill that will extend and expand the Trump tax cuts while reforming Medicaid and other programs to reduce deficits, we are poised to deliver prosperity, freedom, and strength to the American people,” Roy said in a statement at the time.

Crucially, it may not actually matter if Republicans approve of Donald Trump’s proposed budget. The administration isn’t ruling out using impoundment to override Congress’s decision, one official in the Office of Management and Budget told Politico. If the administration goes the route of impoundment, the president will be intruding on Congress’s power of the purse, in violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. While Trump and his allies may claim the rule is unconstitutional, it’s not clear that the courts will agree.

The Trump administration’s decision to deport immigrants to the U.S. base on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, cost taxpayers at least $21 million between January 20 and April 8.

Right now, the base only holds 32 immigrants, making the whole effort look like a massive waste. Close to 500 people in total have been held there since January, with no more than 200 at a time. Many immigrants held there have been returned back to the United States, as was the case with 40 people briefly held at the prison in March.

Flying immigrants to Cuba also carries a steep price: $26,277 is the average cost per flight hour for the military aircraft the Trump administration used. The drain of taxpayer dollars has drawn criticism from Democrats in Congress.

“Every American should be outraged by Donald Trump wasting military resources to pay for his political stunts that do not make us safer,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “U.S. service members did not sign up for this abuse of power.”

The military flew 46 flights this year between Trump’s inauguration and the beginning of April, lasting 802.5 hours and costing $21,087,300, according to Department of Defense data shared with Warren. So far, though, the total effort is far below Trump’s January promise to hold 30,000 immigrants at the Cuba facility.

But even if the Guantánamo Bay base was holding as many immigrants as Trump promised, it would still be a bad idea to use the detention center in this way, or even at all. A relic of the Cold War days when Cuba’s Communist regime was aligned with the Soviet Union, Guantánamo Bay became notorious after the September 11 attacks for holding terrorism suspects under the questionable legal designation of “enemy combatants.”

And Trump wants more immigrants held there: U.S. Transportation Command has ordered that a new additional weekly flight to Guantánamo begin. It’s part of a mission named Operation Southern Guard and involves the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the military. The base should have been closed years ago, but thanks to the inaction of previous Congresses and presidents, it continues serving a dubious purpose.