Trump’s latest conflict of interest? Accepting a plane from Qatari royals.

This week, President Donald Trump will head to the Middle East for the first foreign trip of his second term. While he is there, he will reportedly manufacture a new conflict of interest for himself by accepting a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet as a gift from the Qatari royal family.

Trump will use the plane as the new Air Force One until just before the end of his term, at which point the plane’s ownership will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, according to ABC, which first reported the news, citing sources familiar with the proposed arrangement. ABC reports that the gift of the plane—which is reportedly so opulent that it’s known as “the flying palace”—will be announced this week, when Trump visits Qatar.

According to ABC, the White House and Department of Justice concluded that the gift does not constitute bribery because it is “not conditioned on any official act.” The U.S. Air Force will modify the 13-year-old aircraft to meet the standards of a plane used to carry the president, and Attorney General Pam Bondi and top White House lawyer David Warrington reportedly believe that transferring the plane to the Trump library foundation before the end of his term will make the arrangement legally sound.

The approximate value of the plane is approximately $400 million, aviation experts told ABC—and that’s before whatever upgrades the Air Force will make. (And we know Trump likes his gold trimmings.)

Trump has long been obsessed with upgrading the presidential plane. During his first term, the White House awarded Boeing a $3.9 billion contract to build new presidential planes. The work was supposed to be completed by the end of last year and has repeatedly been delayed; earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump commissioned another company, L3Harris, to overhaul the Qatari plane to be ready for use by this fall.

Obviously, despite the administration’s apparent self-delusion that they are not running afoul of any laws or ethics guidelines, questions around the ethics of the gift of the new plane abound—and what Qataris will expect in return. The Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, for example, prohibits any person holding elected office from accepting gifts “from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Several Democrats—including those on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.)—pointed to that rule as evidence that accepting the gift would be illegal. Kathleen Clark, a law professor at the Washington University School of Law, told the Associated Press the news is “outrageous,” adding that the gift is the “logical, inevitable, unfortunate consequence of Congress and the Supreme Court refusing to enforce” the Emoluments Clause.

But as we well know by now, the possibility of breaking laws does not seem to deter the president—who was found guilty on 34 felony counts in the hush-money case in which he covered up payments to Stormy Daniels—from doing whatever he wants.

In fact, Trump has explicitly bent the law to his will. In February, the administration announced it would not enforce one of the strongest anti-bribery and corruption laws—the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—for at least the next six months, as my colleague Russ Choma reported at the time. A legal expert told Choma that the pausing of the law, which prohibits American companies from paying bribes to do business in foreign countries, would make it harder to rebuff foreign officials trying to extort them. “It’s a really good time to be a corrupt official in Russia or Asia,” Jessica Tillipman, the dean of government procurement law at George Washington University, told Choma.

Following his re-election, Trump flouted a law that he signed in 2020 requiring presidents-elect to outline ethics requirements for their transition members; when he finally did share the plan well past the deadline, it did not contain any details about how Trump himself would abide by the code. Since then, high-profile administration officials have also failed to file paperwork showing they divested from Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that owns his Truth Social platform, which several officials held shares in or were on the board of, as my colleague Anna Merlan wrote last month.

And as my colleague Mike Mechanic outlined at the time of Trump’s inauguration, several of Trump’s other businesses have also presented major conflicts of interests, and potential national security risks, including: Trump’s Manhattan tower, which reportedly rented luxury condos to foreign governments; his other properties, which have hosted Saudi-backed golf events; international Trump developments in Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; and the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins. We also still do not know who financed Trump’s transition, which his team has declined to disclose after refusing to sign agreements with the General Services Administration that would compel disclosure, as previous presidents have done. And to top it all off, just a couple of weeks ago, the Trump Organization struck a $5.5 billion deal to build an international golf club in Qatar.

Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

Last year, in a dissent over whether Trump should have immunity from criminal prosecution for “official” acts taken as president, US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” Coupled with the administration’s jailing of its political opponents and flouting of the Constitution, the news of the gift appears to make that characterization accurate. The real threat to our democratic institutions and national interests, then, may not be the foreign kings the Emoluments Clause warned about, but the one sitting in the White House.