America First? Hegseth Announces Foreign Air Force Facility in U.S.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made a shocking announcement from the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday announced the establishment of a Qatari military installation in Idaho.
Seated beside Qatar’s defense minister, Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Hegseth announced that the United States is “signing a letter of acceptance to build a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility at the Mountain Home Air Base in Idaho.”
The facility, the defense secretary said, “will host a contingent of Qatari F-15s and pilots to enhance our combined training, increase lethality, interoperability”—though he provided little else by way of detail.
The two officials signed a letter green-lighting the move, after Hegseth praised Qatar for its role in securing a peace deal in Gaza. Notably, the announcement also comes from an administration heavily criticized for corruption involving Qatar, a country the president accused of being a “funder of terrorism” in his first term.
The agreement builds on an existing U.S.-Qatari military relationship. Under a $12 billion deal signed in 2017, the U.S. gave aircraft and U.S.-based training to Qatar. In 2022, it was reported that about 170 Qataris were to be sent to train with F-15s at Idaho’s Mountain Home Air Base, which already hosts Singaporean forces and would be expanded to accommodate the new arrivals.
Representative Mike Simpson, a pro-Trump Republican of Idaho, called the development “fantastic news.” But some proponents of the president’s so-called America First cause disagree.
Laura Loomer, an informal Trump adviser and frequent purveyor of Islamaphobic hysteria, decried the administration’s decision. “What the hell is going on? Why are we trying to train more Muslims how to fly planes on US soil? Didn’t we already learn our lesson?” she wrote, saying it would allow “the Islamic enemy to gain so much ground in our country.”