This Needs Fixin'

So, apparently Quatar wants to give an all-luxed-up Boing 747 to Trump.

Just, ya know, because they’re known for their generosity.

Ha.

On it’s face, such a gift would be spectacularly illegal. As-in, specifically-forbidden-in-the-Constitution levels of illegal.

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

It’s badly written, with an untethered “under them” floating around to confuse things, but still pretty clear: any official, agent or employee of the federal government is forbidden from accepting “gifts” from other countries unless Congress approves it.

This was never controversial before Trump.

Giving odd, often culturally-specific, gifts has been a standard feature of diplomacy since long before modern countries came along.

And the U.S. way of dealing with this has always been that these gifts are made to the country, not to the President or diplomat or whoever receives them. The gift gets passed along from the recipient to the Treasury; no fuss, no muss.

But Trump wantssss the big plane.

So the skive they’ve come up with is:

• Quatar gives the plane to the United States
• which will use it during Trump’s term
• after which it will go to the Trump Presidential Library
• which will let Trump use it whenever he wants

The “thinking” here being that Trump himself will never actually own it, but it’ll always be owned by organizations he controls.

This is spectacularly stupid.

The plane could almost certainly not be re-fitted to the standards required for a Presidential transport before the end of Trump’s term. It would have to be stripped down to its skeleton just to get access to all the bits that would have to be checked for spying or recording devices before it could even start being fitted with the standard Air Force One defensive modifications.

And its onboard computers could never pass a reasonable security review.

So it could never function as Air Force One.

Which invalidates the whole scheme for handing it over to Trump.

But the whole scheme was pointless anyway because U.S. law not only places a value on the thing itself but also on having the beneficial use of a thing.

Now, I have no idea what the dollar value having use of a Boeing 747 slathered with gold paint may be but I sincerely doubt that it’s “nothing”.

And at no point in all this shuffling about does Trump not retain the use of the plane.

Which makes it just a bribe.

The amazing thing is that even at a (probably inflated) valuation of $400 million, the Quatari 747 isn’t even the highest valued bribe Trump has finagled so far.

That dishonor goes to all the free legal services Trump’s crew has extorted out of various legal-firms-who-should-know-better.

The latest sum I’ve seen for that particular scam is $940 million.

Which is a very impressive haul.

Even if it is just in free use of legal firms who were too bad at their jobs to realize that Trump doesn’t stay bribed.

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