THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING — President Donald Trump is back in Washington after a four-day trip around the Middle East that both put more miles on the aging current Air Force One and set the stage for what Trump hopes will be a shiny new model. During the trip, Trump indicated that he would accept a gift plane from the Qatari royal family to serve as a new official presidential aircraft. There are currently two identical 747-200s as well as some smaller presidential aircraft that are part of the “Air Force One” fleet. This announcement riled up everyone from pro-Trump influencer Laura Loomer to Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, who called the gift “the definition of corruption.” But Trump might be especially licking his chops at the idea of a new presidential aircraft because of the state of the old ones, in use since 1990, with conversations to replace them since the Obama administration. In 2018, the Air Force formalized a contract with Boeing to deliver two new planes, which are behind schedule. The Qatari jet is loaded with modern amenities and opulence. What it won’t be equipped for in the same way is the ability to serve as a “flying White House,” according to Frank Kendall, who served as the Secretary of the Air Force during the Biden administration. To understand more about the state of play of the current and future Air Force One, Nightly spoke with Kendall. This interview has been edited. What are the major differences between a commercial 747 and Air Force One? It’s a pretty dramatic difference. One way to get a frame of reference is a commercial aircraft of this size is going to cost roughly $200 million to $300 million. Air Force One costs about $2 billion, and the reason is that it’s a flying White House. You try to put onto the aircraft everything that the president would get for support when he’s in the White House. The capabilities of the Situation Room, full medical support, the ability to host people, because it’s an aircraft that has to go to foreign places and carry the President and his staff and so on. You have support capabilities, food service and storage capacity for that long enough to cover the duration of a trip. You also have some things there for security, Secret Service and the White House put extensive security on the aircraft. When you add all those things together, they’re expensive and they also are very hard to get into an airplane. So what we always struggle with in these aircrafts is getting into them everything that the White House team wants to have for the support of the president. And what are the differences between the plane Qatar is offering and Air Force One? Essentially, it’s a flying palace. It’s very luxurious on the inside. It’s all custom printed out to whatever specifications that the customer may have. And it’s often, quite frankly, very opulent. Things like either gold- or platinum-plated fixtures, silk carpeting and wall coverings, all custom made, for a very luxurious period of time while you’re flying on the airplane. But what it doesn’t have to that point is many of the capabilities that you’re talking about with Air Force One. You would not have any of the ability to have a nuclear conference call, highly secure communications, highly reliable communications of various types. Protective measures. There might be some medical support on board for whoever the owner was, but nothing like what you’d have for the president, and there wouldn’t be any storage capacity for support for the president and staff over a long period of time. This situation began because of the difficulties that Boeing has had delivering their orders for a new Air Force One on time. Can you explain the timeline and Boeing’s struggles? Yeah, the order has been out for about 10 years now. You can foresee when these airplanes are going to wear out, and you can try to keep maintaining airplanes longer than really makes economic sense to do. During the first Trump administration, a price was set between the CEO of Boeing and President Trump, at $3.9 billion for two aircrafts, and Boeing took a fixed price contract to deliver to the requirements. And they have really, really struggled to do that. They’ve lost, I think, over $2 billion already on the program, and have found some issues they didn’t anticipate. Boeing’s just really struggled to try to get these two airplanes delivered. When you worked in the Obama administration, you were also discussing a new Air Force One purchase, correct? We hadn’t finalized the contract. We had decided on a 747, there wasn’t really much choice about that. They were coming out of production, and we were basically going to take an aircraft and modify it. One of the problems they got into was structural issues. That was not on our radar or something we expected to see happen. What are the specific security components of Air Force One? I can say, basically communications should be reliable under almost any circumstances, to other key leadership, to foreign leaders. You might need to talk to governors in a national disaster, for example. So we try to put a pretty complete suite of communications capabilities that are going to be dependable. You need to have the ability to do conference calls, for example; that’s an important part of doing the work of the president. I can’t really say much of anything about what might be there to provide for his security while he’s on the airplane. Sure, there are measures to do that, and there have been some stories I’ve seen in the press about what those might be, but I don’t think I’m allowed to say anything specific about that. What are the influence concerns with Qatar potentially providing a new Air Force One? Again, I’m going off of press reports about business dealings that the Trump business organization, as well as the Trump family, has with Qatar. As far as the U.S. relationship with Qatar, there may be issues there as well. If nothing else, the appearance here is not attractive. As a government person of any type, I would not have been allowed to accept gifts. The president could potentially accept this, I believe, on behalf of the American people if it became property of the American people; the analogy to the Statue of Liberty has been made sometimes. But the problem with this, as I understand it, is he’s going to take the airplane with him when he leaves office. It’s going to go to his personal presidential library, which is not a government institution, and having that as part of the condition of the gift makes it personal. One other issue that’s getting a very strong reaction from people in his own party is, we don’t want our American president flying on a gift from Qatar. This is the plane that represents America. It represents the American people. It represents the office of the presidency. It’s not just about Donald Trump. The president has the right to waive any concerns about security or influence in the purchase of the aircraft though, correct? The requirements are not set by statute. They’re not provided by Congress. These are things that we determine internally in the federal government are military or operational necessities. The president, ultimately, is in charge. He’s the commander-in-chief, he’s the chief executive. So he can choose, in an extreme example, to say ‘I don’t want any of this stuff. I will just put the vice president in charge while I’m on the airplane.’ No president’s ever done that, but that’s a possibility. There’s an office that works for him that sets those requirements, but it works for him, and so if he prioritizes, as appears to have happened in this case, to get a new airplane with the colors he prefers while he’s in office, he has latitude as the commander-in-chief to say ‘I’m just going to take the plane. I’ll take whatever communications are already on there.’ A lot of people will push back and try to get him to do more than that, but at the end of the day, he's in charge. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh .
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