Very confused old man given test ride by dealership, thinks car is actually a gift
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Pretty funny if not like a clown investigation here (gift link) from Maggie’s farm.
TL;DR: Trump’s announcement that Qatar was giving him a very special 747 that’s been tricked out like a luxury jet for six year old pimps was just Adderal Grandpa getting all confused and excited about a potential new toy:
Interviews with 14 people involved in or briefed on the search for the replacement plane say it started when the White House Military Office, which oversees presidential travel, worked with Boeing and the Defense Department to compile a list of every late-model 747 on the market with a business-jet layout, which could more quickly be retrofitted into a presidential plane.
There were only eight planes in the world that fit the bill, including a flashy double-decker jet that Qatar had been trying to sell for several years, with no luck.
A brochure for the aircraft advertised just the kind of opulence Mr. Trump favors. There were “soft fabrics of the highest quality” in the bedroom, along with “luxurious leather and exquisite wood veneers” and a “lavishly designed” bathroom that is “almost a piece of art.”
I bet.
Hey, who’s at the center of this cluster? Oh this guy:
This second 747 was still available for sale.
Mr. Witkoff, an old friend from Mr. Trump’s early days in New York real estate, knew the Qataris well. The country’s sovereign wealth fund had bailed him out in 2023 when a real estate deal on Central Park South went bad.
It’s good to have friends.
So Mr. Witkoff got in touch with the Qataris to ask about the plane.
Love at First Sight
By mid-February, Qatar had agreed to send the jet to Florida when Mr. Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago resort, so he could see the plane firsthand.
The plane arrived on the morning of Saturday, Feb. 15, after a nonstop flight from Doha to West Palm Beach, Fla., according to flight tracking records. Mr. Trump left his club for the short drive to the airport and stepped out of his limousine about 10 a.m., to lay eyes on a plane that once had been used by the Qatari royal family.
“Every surface and detail in this room reflects the opulent design,” the sales brochure said. “The highest level of craftsmanship and engineering prowess was applied to outfit the interior meticulously.”
See if you can guess where this is heading.
By the time Mr. Trump toured the aircraft on Feb. 15, discussions about how to acquire the plane had changed. The talk among senior aides to Mr. Trump shifted from a government-to-government sale to a donation.
Ah the passive voice.
That was a surprise to Air Force officials. At no point, Pentagon officials said, did the Air Force propose that the plane be donated.
One senior administration official told The Times that Qatar raised the option of a potential gift, or at least that Qatari officials were “agreeable” to the idea of a no-charge, government-to-government transfer when it came up. A second official said Mr. Witkoff, for one, always believed the transaction would be a donation.
The inevitable punchline is the Qataris had been trying to sell this monstrosity unsuccessfully for years, and thought they had found somebody vain and stupid enough to buy it:
Government officials in Qatar — who had long wanted to unload the plane — had a different version of the sequence of events, according to a person familiar with their timeline.
They were willing to send the jet to Florida for Mr. Trump to take a personal tour. But the expectation was that the plane would be sold to the United States, not offered as a gift.
Now of course they’re finding out that Donald Trump’s basic economic theory of life is that you give him stuff for free, and maybe one day he will be able to do you a favor. It’s all about the relationship dontcha know, plus a refusal is not the act of a friend:
Mr. Witkoff also has strong personal ties to the Gulf kingdom that go back several years. Aside from the bailout by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar’s prime minister, attended the wedding of one of Mr. Witkoff’s sons.
“I have a personal relationship,” Sheikh Mohammed said in an interview this year with Tucker Carlson, around the time the plane negotiations were underway, describing his ties to Mr. Witkoff.
Let’s make a deal:
The Qatari plane has a luxurious interior. But considerable work would be necessary to prepare the plane to serve as a true Air Force One — including ridding the jet of any hidden electronic listening devices and adding advanced communications equipment and specialized systems to protect the plane from a missile attack or other threats. And even if the plane is donated, the cost of those retrofits would be enormous, according to current and former Pentagon officials: at least $1 billion.
Which is pretty funny, given that that figure is about ten times what the plane was being shopped for by the Qataris.
“It is ridiculous,” Mr. Foulkrod said of the idea that the Qatari plane could be a quick fix, adding that the existing Boeing projects could probably be accelerated more. “That’s a better dollar value than trying to take an airplane from somebody else and trying to make it into a presidential plane. It makes no sense.”
The Qatari plane is currently in San Antonio, according to photographs of the plane and flight records examined by The Times.
No new appropriation for any work on the plane — or to maintain it and supply a crew — has been approved by Congress, which would be sure to scrutinize any deal completed with Qatar.
White House officials have said they are considering hiring L3Harris, a military contractor, to handle the work needed on the Qatari plane, although the source of the money to do this work, or even the total price tag, has not been made public.
Four words: Department of Government Efficiency