When famed American revolutionary Benjamin Franklin departed his post as ambassador to court of King Louis XVI in 1785, the French sovereign bestowed upon Franklin a lavish gift: a diamond-encrusted snuff box featuring a portrait of the monarch.
Though France was an ally of the then-fledgling United States, and military support from Versailles had been essential to the success of the American revolution two years earlier, Franklin’s present was treated with scrutiny upon his return to North America. There, the newly created US Congress was required to formally approve the exchange as a gift from a foreign government to a public official.
“No one charged the king’s agent with explicit promises or threats,” wrote Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout in the 2014 book Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. “Instead, the worry was that intimate obligations that arise from large gifts could interfere with public commitments.”
Though the USA would rewrite its system of government within a few years of the snuff-box incident, similar anti-corruption language was included in the new constitution: a passage now known as the “emoluments clause” that still holds sway in the modern era.
Rarely used in everyday speech, the word “emolument” is suddenly on the lips of pundits and politicians in Washington following the Trump administration’s acceptance of a used Boeing 747-8 business jet donated by Qatar in May.
The Pentagon took possession of the widebody aircraft on 21 May, though the White House says the exact terms of the exchange between Washington and Doha are still being negotiated.
The US Department of Defense says it plans to perform unspecified upgrades to the jet for security and “functional mission” purposes with the US Air Force (USAF).
That mission is expected to be presidential transport flights, a duty currently carried out by two Boeing 747-200-based VC-25As bearing the signature blue-and-white livery of the aircraft known as Air Force One while the president is aboard.
Opposition lawmakers from the Democratic party are casting the gifted 747 as a security risk and a $400 million conflict of interest, while Trump has hit back, saying it would be foolish not to accept the jet.
In an interview with Fox News, the president said the aircraft is being given to the Pentagon and the USAF, not to him personally, and thus does not run afoul of corruption rules like the emoluments clause.
“They’re not giving it to me,” Trump said on 16 May. “We need a plane for a couple of years before we get the other ones because Boeing is very late.”
Those “other ones” are two 747-8s being converted by Boeing into customised presidential transport jets designated VC-25Bs.
Boeing is under contract with the Pentagon to deliver the pair to take over Air Force One duties from the ageing VC-25As, which entered service in 1990.
Boeing inked the $4 billion deal in 2018 during Trump’s first term but has run into significant delays in the process of converting the commercial aircraft for military use. Now years delayed, the VC-25B programme has generated more than $1 billion in penalty charges for Boeing, tied to violations of the fixed-price contract’s schedule and cost parameters.
Trump has expressed impatience with the VC-25B programme and with Boeing since the early days of his second term in office. He appears anxious to take receipt of the new jets, expressing vague dissatisfaction with his current ride.
“Air Force One is 42 years old,” Trump posted to Truth Social on 16 May.
Trump’s immediate predecessor, former President Joe Biden, never publicly communicated any displeasure with the VC-25A fleet.
It remains unclear exactly when the first VC-25B will be ready, with Boeing providing dates ranging from 2027 to 2029 – after Trump leaves office.
While Trump and his aides have positioned the Qatari 747 as a short-term stopgap, analysts say converting a foreign-owned aircraft for such a sensitive mission is wildly impractical, both cost- and timing-wise.
“It’s going to take over a year to strip it down and do the basics,” says Richard Aboulafia, managing director at consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory.
Aboulafia estimates the USA will pay “way over” $1 billion to fully inspect the Qatar-sourced 747 for espionage devices and to retrofit the jet with mission systems and countermeasures required for the airborne command post that is Air Force One.
“I’m not sure what the point is,” he notes. “You can get something that has a much greater level of security, and a much greater level of capability, without waiting. It is called the current Air Force One.”
Aboulafia is sceptical of Trump’s position that the VC-25As are too old to effectively perform their mission while Boeing works to deliver the first successor.
“The comms and onboard capabilities have been extensively upgraded over the years, so it’s far more capable than some kind of interim plane,” he notes. “This is an upholstery question.
Undertaking a conversion of the Qatar-747 could cost more than that jet is actually worth, even amounting to a significant fraction of the total VC-25B contract.
“The true value of it is not very high at all,” Tony Bancroft, aerospace and defence portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, says of the Qatari jet.
A standard configured 747-8 of similar age might command a market value of $40 million, Bancroft says, if it were purchased by a commercial operator with minimal modifications needed.
But the gifted 747-8 is a customised Boeing Business Jet that would require extensive retrofits, leaving it with an incredibly small number of potential buyers. Before offering up the jet to the White House, the Qatari royal family had unsuccessfully sought to sell it since 2020.
The cost-benefit analysis of using the jet for presidential missions does not pencil out, Bancroft says. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Bancroft, who flew Boeing F/A-18 fighters in the US Marine Corps, adds that the timing of the jet’s readiness for presidential flights will depend on how much risk the White House and Pentagon are willing to accept.
“When I was flying the Hornet, there was always the [standard operating procedure], and then there were waivers,” he notes.
Waivers are exceptions granted to US military policy, which in the case of Air Force One could perhaps allow the president to fly on an aircraft less-capable than the approved VC-25A. Bancroft thinks that is one possible outcome for the converted Qatari jet.
Trump has said he expects the Qatari-gifted 747-8 would eventually be transferred to his presidential library. Such institutions are common for former residents of the White House, who create the private not-for-profit entities to catalogue their presidencies.
There is precedent for such a move. Ronald Regan’s presidential library in California includes a Boeing 707-derived VC-137C that served as Air Force One for seven US presidents from 1973 to 2001.
It is somewhat nebulous how Reagan secured the jet as his enduring monument. The presidential library of Lyndon B Johnson was less successful in a later attempt to secure the sister VC-137C, now on display at the Museum of the US Air Force.
Reagan’s library did not take possession of the VC-137C until it was retired more than 10 years after he left office, at which point the aircraft had also carried three of his White House successors.
Trump’s converted Qatari business jet will only have a logged a few years of US service when he leaves office in 2029, around when the new VC-25Bs will be entering service.
In a 12 May press conference, Trump said the converted jet will go to his library after he departs the presidency.
“Some day it will be like Ronald Reagan, [the aircraft] get to a certain age, they decommission them, and it will go to my library… in years out”.
Asked if he planned to make personal use of the jet in his post-White House years, Trump said, ”I wouldn’t be using it, no. It would go directly to the library after I leave office”.
If the gifted 747-8 is eventually retired and transferred to directly to Trump, legal scholar Richard Painter says it would face an uncertain future, with the spectre of an emoluments clause violation being raised retroactively.
“This is a present from a foreign government in violation of the emoluments clause,” Painter says. “He can’t take it without permission from Congress.”
Now a law professor at the University of Minnesota, Painter previously served as a White House ethics counsel for President George W Bush.
Congress could solve the emoluments entanglement with a simple resolution approving the gifted 747, much as legislators did for Benjamin Franklin’s snuff box in 1785.
However, Painter thinks current political considerations make that unlikely.
“I don’t think these members of Congress want to be on record of voting ‘yes’ to accept a plane from Qatar, when Qatar has given some $2 billion to Hamas,” he says, referencing the Palestinian militant group fighting a bloody and protracted war against Israel in Gaza.
Trump himself has described Hamas, which Washington formally designates a terrorist organisation, as “sick and twisted”. Both Trump and his predecessor have lavished Israel with military and rhetorical support throughout its campaign against Hamas.
While opposition Democrats have attempted to force a vote on the matter, an official position from the legislative branch has proved elusive. If no approval vote ever comes, Painter says it throws the long-term future of the jet into uncertainty.
“A subsequent administration could come in there and say, ‘We’re going to seize the plane’, and I think they would have [legal] standing, and I think the courts would probably agree with them,” he says.
During his first term, Trump faced several court cases alleging his private business dealings while in office violated the US constitution’s anti-gift language, including a lawsuit from 2017 in which Painter was a counsel representing the plaintiffs.
All of those cases were eventually dismissed either because the plaintiff was found not to have been harmed by Trump’s actions or because the president had already left office after losing to rival Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Painter suspects no legal intervention will stop the 747 transfer from Qatar, because the gift itself does not directly harm a US entity, such as a competing aircraft manufacturer.
“I don’t know who can go to court,” he says. “If the government had cancelled the Boeing contract, then Boeing could have sued. But the government is not doing that; the government’s going to pay Boeing.”
In the previous emoluments court cases against Trump, Painter says only direct competitors to Trump family businesses were found to have legal standing, alleging that foreign customers were giving preferential treatment and business to Trump’s ventures as a way to gain favour with the White House.
Painter is also sceptical of the president’s argument that the Qatari 747 is a gift to the US Department of Defense, rather than to him personally.
“Federal agencies are not allowed to accept gifts from corporations [or] anybody, not just foreign governments, unless they’re specifically authorised by Congress,” he notes.
Trump himself described the luxury 747 as a “gift, free of charge” in a signature all-capital-letters post to Truth Social, seemingly ending doubt about how the aircraft should be categorised.
The jet’s future is far from clear, with Democrats in the narrowly divided Congress largely opposed, and even some Trump allies expressing scepticism.
While the ethical argument does not appear to be swaying many opinions, concerns about the president’s safety and the security of sensitive intelligence and communications installed on the jet may yet prevail.
Senator Chris Coons, top Democrat on the powerful appropriations subcommittee on defence, calls the plan a “national security risk of the highest order”.
Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz voiced a concern about Qatar’s connection to Hamas and more technical matters of national security.
“I also think that the plane poses significant espionage and surveillance problems,” he told CNBC in May.
The Pentagon has not revealed how it will modify the Qatari 747 for presidential transport. Military systems integrator L3Harris is reportedly being tapped for the job, but the company has repeatedly declined to comment.
L3Harris does a robust trade in altering business jets for military use, recently completing its 60th such conversion. The company is under contract with the US Army to field Bombardier Global 6500 business jets modified for long-range surveillance and intelligence collection.
Rival Sierra Nevada Corporation performs similar work, and last year won a US Army contract to develop the EM-11B Hades long-range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platform, also derived from the Global 6500.
During a 28 May press event in the Oval Office, Trump affirmed that the Qatari 747-8 will be “re-fitted for military standard”, without providing specifics. The president did not offer a schedule or cost estimate, saying only that the expense would be less than that of a new aircraft.
However, some buyer’s remorse might be setting in, tied to the new jet’s size. At 76m (250ft), the 747-8 is roughly 6m longer than the VC-25As.
“Frankly, it’s much too big,” Trump said at the White House.
