The Sky-High Corruption of Donald Trump

Back when outrage over Donald Trump’s blatant Oval Office corruption was still a novelty, a group of former national security officials filed an amicus brief in a 2019 lawsuit Democratic congressional leaders brought over Trump’s repeated violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. They cited one scenario as a clear and present threat to US national security interests: “A nation that plays a central role in the balance of power in the Middle East, one of the most fraught regions for U.S. national security in the world [could] curry favor with the President by purchasing real estate from one of his companies.”

Like much of the grim constitutional prophesying of that bygone era, this hypothetical illustration now looks laughably naive. Trump-branded real-estate conflicts in the Middle East still abound, of course—most notoriously via Trump’s son-in-law and erstwhile Middle East envoy Jared Kushner’s billion-dollar dealings with the Saudis. Yet Trump’s own newly announced deal with the Qatari royal family to deliver him a new Air Force One jet worth $400 million marks a breathtaking new level of presidential corruption. Indeed, the transaction, which has been hastily packaged as a “gift” from the Qatari government to the Pentagon, is a textbook illustration of the imperial corruption that the founders targeted in drafting the Emoluments Clause, which forbids the president from using his office for personal enrichment. Trump announced the deal on the eve of his first Middle East junket in his second term. The president’s visit to Qatar is bound to be steeped in superlative appreciations of his customized Boeing 747-8, which its original owners have quaintly dubbed “a palace in the sky.”

You can instantly gauge the depth of the self-dealing here by Trump’s overheated defense of the transaction. In an X post, the president announced, “The fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist that we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA.”

This outburst showcases every element of the Trumpian defense of corruption, starting with the mind-bending assertion that insulating the presidency from foreign financial influence is somehow a “Crooked” political maneuver, as opposed to a central plank of constitutional governance. There’s also the ludicrous notion that the Qatari emolument is a savvy piece of deal-making, and not a quid-pro-quo arrangement to benefit the donor. The tell here is Trump’s adverbial stipulation that the deal is temporary; if it were such a self-evident boon to the country, shouldn’t it be permanent? In reality, of course, ownership of the airborne palace will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation at the end of his term—the deal employs the federal government as a dummy corporation that’s hosting a pass-through arrangement to land the aircraft safely in Trump’s gilded empire of grift.

The Qatari payoff also defies Trump’s bogus image as the heroic savior of American industry, as he’s gone out of his way to engineer a disastrous global trade war in order to preside over a “golden age” in US manufacturing. The American aerospace giant Boeing has an existing $5 billion contract to replace both Air Force One jets—a project that’s now five years behind its delivery date with reported company losses of more than $2.5 billion. Part of that overrun is due to the technical challenges of outfitting a plane with the basic security and communications safeguards required in a presidential aircraft—indeed, the economies Trump boasts he’s achieving in the Qatari “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE” will soon evaporate when the government will have to essentially disassemble and rebuild the craft to ensure that it operates free of foreign surveillance.

Beyond that, though, Boeing has become a purveyor of hazardous and performance-challenged aircraft thanks to a regime of financialized corporate governance that scorns basic engineering protocols and safeguards. In other words, Trump is scurrying to a foreign monarchy to meet his air travel demands because the American contractor originally charged with producing a pair of Air Force Ones has failed to meet its obligations under a Trumpian model of commerce that privileges stock buybacks over performance fundamentals. Small wonder, then, that Trump’s own tirade trails off into a phoned-in show of rancor: “Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA”

But, alas, Trump isn’t wrong to call out Democratic fecklessness. During Trump’s first term, Democratic congressional leaders failed to bring emoluments charges in their impeachment actions against the president. That’s why national security advisers were reduced to weighing in on a civil suit against Trump for his many emoluments violations, which ranged from trademark deals with China for the Trump Organization to the proposed use of his Doral golf compound for a G-7 meeting to his doubling of the Mar-a-Lago initiation fee to $200,000 shortly after his election. And the civil suit eventually ran aground once it reached the US Supreme Court, which predictably declared the issue moot after Trump completed his first term. (Indeed, the Trump-stacked right-wing court is itself a plain instance of executive branch corruption run amok, but that is a sermon for another occasion.)

The timorousness of Democratic leaders in the face of such blatant abuse of power failed to exploit a political opportunity. At the time, Trump was using the Oval Office to benefit himself on a scale unseen in the annals of presidential corruption—and exposing his fraudulent business practices would upend the chief basis of his demagogic appeal as a master dealmaker. Instead, Democrats first homed in on the effort to bribe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with a military aid package and then sought to impeach Trump for fomenting the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Both of those shameful criminal episodes were founded in Trump’s bedrock conviction that he’s an unparalleled gamer of the governing racket, and the effort to police them in Congress would have been greatly advanced by emoluments charges undercutting Trump’s phony standing as a maestro of the deal.

The same core dynamic holds true today—there’s nothing stopping Democrats from stressing the ways in which Trump’s corruption is integral to how he rules and to his transformation of the federal government into a transactional mob syndicate enforced by goons such as Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Kash Patel. Indeed, the impeachment resolution introduced last month by Michigan Democratic Representative Shri Thanedar includes an article on “bribery and corruption” that cites the Emoluments Clause. A Democratic Party serious about combating MAGA authoritarianism and graft could start by reversing its policy of treating Thanedar like a fringe pariah.

Instead, Congress’s functional silence on emoluments has further enabled the posture of MAGA impunity in Trump’s second term, which has, among other things, transformed January 6 into a model of right-wing governance. Congress’s dilatory treatment of Trumpian corruption is also why, for all Trump’s whining over the Qatar deal, Democratic responses somehow manage to be worse. “Nothing says ‘America First’ like Air Force One, brought to you by Qatar,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement on X. “It’s not just bribery, it’s premium foreign influence with legroom.” No, Chuck—nothing says “failing to do your job” like thinking you can combat executive-branch influence-peddling with some staffer’s pathetic idea of a social media zinger.