“Before President Trump arrives here in Saudi Arabia to begin signing billions of dollars worth of deals, one deal appears on the house, guys,” Fox correspondent Lucas Tomlinson told the show’s co-hosts. “Qatar saying they will gift a 747 jet to the White House to be used as Air Force One.”
“Is that allowed, Lucas?” asked Brian Kilmeade.
“Well, Brian, it’s not the first time we’ve had airline diplomacy in the region,” Tomlinson replied. “Let’s go back to after the Yalta Conference, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gifted three airliners to the Saudis to kickstart Saudi airlines. So this has happened before.”
That Tomlinson had to go back 80 years to identify a point of comparison, only to come up with something so absurdly off-base, is pretty damning.
“Trump's lawyers say this is not a gift to himself, it's a gift to the United States,” Tomlinson continued, acknowledging neither that one of those lawyers used to work for Qatar nor that the next president reportedly will not have access to that plane once Trump leaves office.
“Of course, you always have to be aware of Trojan horses,” he concluded, suggesting that there might, perhaps, be a small national security issue raised by letting a foreign government that has funded international terrorist groups provide the plane that carries the U.S. president.
“Also, Lucas, I think the real story is: What’s the delay on the new Air Force One?” co-host Lawrence Jones asked, referencing production delays by Boeing.
Tomlinson responded that the plane is “designed a little differently than they are for Delta Airlines and United. There’s a lot of sophisticated equipment that has to go in there, but there’s been delays with the program. That’s one of the reasons the White House says they’re more than happy to accept this gift from the Qataris.”
So production for the new Air Force One jet that Boeing is custom-building has been delayed due to the need to install sophisticated security systems to protect the president of the United States, and the solution is… for the president to instead fly around in a plane that lacks those protections and has been provided by a foreign government? Or is it supposed to be easier to add those systems to a plane that was built without them? Please make it make sense.
Fox & Friends did return to the story later that hour, when Kilmeade asked White House press secretary Karolina Leavitt “clarify” whether Qatar was giving the plane as “a personal gift” to Trump. After she said that Qatar was donating the plane to the Defense Department and lawyers were still working out the details, they had this exchange:
KILMEADE: Do you worry that if they give us something like this they want something in return?
LEAVITT: Absolutely not, because they know President Trump and they know he only works with the interests of the American public in mind.
Kilmeade then asked Leavitt to “bring some color and some light to what Mother’s Day meant to you this year.”
Even notorious MAGA conspiracy theorist and Trumpist zealot Laura Loomer says Trump accepting the plane is “very disappointing.” She seems to believe Trump will reward Qatar for their gift by altering his Middle East policy to favor the Gulf monarchy — in other words, a corrupt quid pro quo in which the president is suborned by a foreign government’s largesse.
It’s worth recalling that Fox’s propagandists spent years trying to turn Hunter Biden’s business dealings into a major, impeachment-level scandal for former President Joe Biden, including mentioning the name of the then-president’s son more than 13,000 times over a period of 16 months.
Their theory was that the “Biden Crime Family” was a massive influence-peddling operation in which any money foreign entities paid to anyone connected to Joe Biden was a corrupt payoff that compromised his administration — even if those payments came when he was neither in office nor running for one. Relying largely on insinuation and right-wing bombast, proponents attempted, for example, to turn roughly $4,000 in repaid truck payments, into an impeachable offense.
After scrutinizing an Oversight Committee memo, the topline of which was heavily flogged by Fox, The Washington Post reported that the total value of the entire mishegas was “about $23 million in total payments from foreign sources” to “the Bidens and their associates.” The Post continued: “Of that, nearly $7.5 million can be fairly attributed as going to ‘Bidens,’ but virtually all of it went to Hunter Biden. No money has been traced to Joe Biden.”
The value of the plane Qatar gifted to Trump is thus more than 17 times the value all foreign sources provided to “the Bidens and their associates.” It is more than 53 times the value of all foreign sources provided to “Bidens.” And any number divided by zero is infinity.
