Chuck Schumer Finally Takes Action After Trump Accepts Private Jet

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is placing a hold on all political appointments at the Department of Justice until Attorney General Pam Bondi provides answers over Qatar’s $400 million luxury plane gift to Donald Trump.

Schumer plans to announce the move on Tuesday morning on the Senate floor, and it will be the first time that he will be placing a blanket hold on presidential nominees. The New York senator will also ask the DOJ’s Foreign Agents Registration Act unit to come clean on any Qatari foreign agents inside the United States who could benefit Trump or his businesses, which seems like an allusion to Bondi’s past job as a lobbyist for Qatar.

Punchbowl News reports that Schumer wants to know the specifics of the deal, including how it affects an existing contract with Boeing to provide the planes for Air Force One.

“Until the American people learn the truth about this deal, I will do my part to block the galling and truly breathtaking politicization at the Department of Justice,” Schumer will say, according to Punchbowl.

Trump has tried to explain away the jet gift as something other presidents, such as Ronald Reagan, have also done, even though that isn’t true. In addition to Democrats, some of Trump’s biggest fans on the right have come out against the deal. Even though Trump claims the gift is “free,” it will likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars in modifications to meet Air Force One standards.

In effect, this plane isn’t really a gift, but a bribe, especially considering that earlier this month, Trump’s businesses cut a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar. It’s good that Schumer is taking action, but it’s coming after many other ethical issues in the Trump administration that apparently didn’t warrant a hold on nominees.

Joe Biden’s decline was obvious in the final months of his presidential campaign, but new and intimate accounts by his staffers reveal that the president’s inner circle conducted a cover-up of his faltering mental acuity as early as 2023.

Axios’s national political correspondent Alex Thompson and CNN host Jake Tapper’s book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, doesn’t hit shelves until May 20. But some early glimpses at the book, published Tuesday by The Guardian, provide a more detailed picture of the chaos endemic to the end of Biden’s tenure.

“We attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023,” one unidentified senior aide, who quit the White House in protest of Biden’s campaign, told Thompson and Tapper.

“I love Joe Biden. When it comes to decency, there are few in politics like him,” the aide continued. “Still, it was a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again.”

A Democratic strategist who spoke to the reporting duo was more blunt.

“It was an abomination,” the strategist said. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”

“Since at least 2022,” Biden struggled to maintain his trains of thought. He wavered on his top aides’ names. His speeches dragged.

“When he proved incapable of delivering a two-minute video address without stumbling, aides filmed him with two cameras so the edit would be less obvious,” The Guardian reported.

His regression summoned prominent Democrats to issue stern warnings. In a 2023 visit to the White House, former President Barack Obama reportedly cautioned Biden: “Just make sure you can win the race.” Days before Biden dropped out, then–Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told him that, should he usher in another Trump era due to his own hubris, he would “go down in American history as one of the darkest figures.”

“You have bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever met,” Biden reportedly told Schumer as the senator left.

Power players on Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign team had searing reviews of the president’s performance.

“He totally fucked us,” David Plouffe told Thompson and Tapper. Plouffe was Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and had been tapped to help Harris’s 107-day-sprint to the White House, which he described as a “fucking nightmare.”

“It’s all Biden,” Plouffe said, remarking that Harris’s campaign had begun in a “deep hole,” thanks to Biden’s insistence on staying in the race.

Tapper and Thompson interviewed some 200 individuals for the book, but none of their perspectives swayed Biden—then or now. Last week, while speaking with The View, the 82-year-old continued to deny allegations that he had and was experiencing symptoms of mental decline.

“They are wrong,” Biden said. “There is nothing to sustain that.”

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.