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.”