Armored Against Missiles, Not Against the Gift

Donald Trump unveiled the new Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, a Boeing jet gifted by Qatar and valued at around two hundred million dollars. The aircraft is hardened against every external threat its engineers can name. Against the obligation created by a gift, there is no armor!

It began with a failure. Two Boeing 747-8 aircraft the country ordered in 2018 were supposed to fly in 2024, are now delayed until 2028, and will likely not be completed before the end of Donald Trump’s term. Into that bottleneck, as he himself called it, stepped a foreign state. On Friday, the president presented the new Air Force One in a hangar at Joint Base Andrews, a former Qatari widebody jet meant to bridge the time until the ordered aircraft finally arrive. It is a gift. The government of Qatar handed over the luxury Boeing 747, valued by the industry at roughly two hundred million dollars, and the American government formally accepted it last year, even as questions remained over the propriety and legality of accepting such an expensive gift from a foreign government. Lawmakers from both parties asked whether Qatar was attempting to improperly influence the president. He brushed the concerns aside, saying Qatar had been kind enough to provide it, and recalled asking the Emir for one of their aircraft. An ordinary president, he said, would not do that, an ordinary president stays away from airplanes, but the country had to be represented appropriately.

For him, representation begins with appearance. The baby blue exterior from the Kennedy era is gone, the belly now painted navy blue with a red stripe above it. On the left side, where the president boards, sits the presidential seal. The tail carries a large flag, and the words United States of America are written across the fuselage. The colors matched his taste, he said, people liked the baby blue, but it was time for a change, this was the sleekest line. The new aircraft became necessary once he noticed other nations had more beautiful ones. It is the latest of the known things he has reshaped in his own image, after the Oval Office and the White House ballroom, and most recently the Reflecting Pool.

The presentation itself was all performance. He stepped out of the aircraft with great ceremony while his signature song God Bless the USA played and told several hundred assembled Air Force service members that the aircraft was a flying White House with a level of luxury no one had ever seen before. The hangar, he said, had to be built specifically to accommodate the new aircraft, which is larger than its predecessors. The gifted jet closes the chapter of two baby blue aircraft that have carried presidents since 1990 and have long suffered from technical shortcomings. For more than a decade both parties have complained that the aircraft are cramped and need replacement. His return from the G7 summit in France this week was the final scheduled flight aboard the old aircraft.

Trump: "It flies further and faster than any Air Force One. You don't have to stop for fuel every few hours. You maybe will never have to stop a fuel. It's got, they call it unlimited, well it's pretty close to unlimited."

But turning a civilian airliner into the president’s aircraft is not a matter of taste. The Air Force explained that any aircraft meant to carry the name Air Force One must meet strict requirements, and that the Qatari jet had been rebuilt under a rigorous plan that placed those capabilities above everything else while preserving much of the earlier configuration suited for a head of state. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told Congress last year that every civilian aircraft requires major modifications to become secure enough and that those modifications would probably cost less than four hundred million dollars. Lawmakers worried his impatience left too little time to install defenses against missiles and against the electromagnetic effects of a nuclear explosion. Since September, the Air Force has been preparing the aircraft, which is expected to begin its first test flights soon, the final examination before carrying the president.

With the new jet, he intends next month to fly to the NATO summit in Ankara and at some point return to China, likely for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting that China will host in November. When you land in London or Germany, and elsewhere too, this aircraft surpasses every other one, he said, and that is how it must be for the country. On July 4 it is expected to lead a flyover above Washington, followed by F-22 and F-35 fighter jets. During the presentation he casually mentioned that ships were pouring out through the Strait of Hormuz. The two older aircraft, designated VC-25A, are not retiring but will remain until the new Boeing aircraft, designated VC-25B, enter service, and both they and the Qatari jet will stay available, with a dedicated group selecting the right aircraft for each flight. Other government aircraft are also expected to carry the same red, white, and blue design. He stated that he himself will no longer fly the Qatari jet once he leaves office and instead intends for it to be donated to a future presidential library.

So in the end an aircraft has emerged that is hardened against almost everything human beings could do to it, against missiles and against the pulse of a nuclear explosion, against everything an engineer can name. Only one danger has no armor. A gift of this size creates obligations, even if no one ever speaks the debt aloud, and no defense in the world protects the one who accepts it from the quiet accounting kept by the giver. He calls it representing the country appropriately. Yet a country that allows itself to be carried by foreign property and stores the borrowed object in a library in the end may represent less its own greatness than the question of what it has already promised in return without realizing it.