Donald Trump has indicated he is ready to accept a luxury plane being offered to the US president as a gift from Qatar’s royal family, almost immediately igniting accusations of bribery and corruption as well as commensurate criticism.
A statement from Qatar on Sunday acknowledged it had held discussions with the US about “the possible transfer” of a plane to be used temporarily by Trump as his presidential aircraft, usurping Air Force One. The emirate’s statement denied a final decision over the transfer had been made – or that it was a gift.
Late on Sunday however Trump himself appeared to confirm the plan in a post on his Truth Social platform.
“So 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 we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane,” he wrote.
Yes, what we really want it a flying U.S. fortress “gifted” by a foreign power.
Trump says planned gift of luxury plane from Qatar is a very ‘transparent’
dealcase of corruptionThere, FTFY.
transparent window for Qatar to see US government secrets
I mean, our national security leaders have been an incompetent mess since oh, say, late January. That and Trump’s inability to walk away from a grift places this fully on brand for the junta.
“We like Qatar, don’t we, folks?”
Is “deal” an alternate spelling of “bribe”?
Never let personnel and operational security get in the way of a good ego stroking…
Apropos of recent other news, we had two printers at my college paper for getting things out to paste up onto the flats. They were both fully PostScript compatible, making them infuriatingly slow in 1998.
One was known on the network as Shiva. The other was The Pope. There was a ritual on deadline … “Someone go stroke The Pope,” sort of a superstitious belief that output would happen faster that way. We’d literally pet it in hopes of faster pages. Whether it worked? Likely not.
Tech people are prone to self created superstitions largely because that was the process someone did before and it worked, and nobody knows why, but damned if we’re going to change it and risk it not working now.
My head canon is that at some point before my arrival, someone got exasperated with the output time and happened to start touching it at the exact time it started whirring up, so causation was mistaken for not even correlation but rather coincidence.
