Emoluments

In old-timey English speak, “Emoluments” refers to “a salary, fee, or profit from office.” Salary for the President is pretty easy to figure out- $400,000 a year, plus a $50,000 annual expense account; so in a 4-year term, he’s making $1.6 million dollars gross, plus a generous pension. Not chump change, but to be honest, this is pretty “fair” for the most stressful job in the world. Pretty much every President in my living memory has been independently wealthy, George W. Bush and his father were heirs to oil fortunes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama made their money primarily with book tours, speaking engagements and business investments as they ascended the political ladder. And just like every national would-be and sitting politician, the President’s electoral campaigns carry a lot of cash, from small donors and large, in well-regulated semi-anonymous increments that like to live in stealthy accounts that can go to basically anything. I’m pretty sure our Beto! donations back in 2018 are still buying Whataburger, and I’m a billion percent sure that most people aren’t running for office to deliberately impoverish themselves.

Personal profit is actually a motivator for honesty. In fact, we want our civil servants to be well-paid, if not grossly so. We want our politicians to have fuck-you money, so that they are harder to bribe. And I’m not talking about little trifling bribes like steak dinners, secret hookers or even accommodations for tony condos in D.C.- things that people of relatively modest means can afford. I’m talking about big, consequential bribes, like recreational vehicles and houses and private-school tuitions

Bribes ain’t new, even if luxury motor coaches weren’t around in the 1780s. Luckily, the Founding Fathers installed crystal-clear directions in the Constitution- not the law, the Constitution of the United States of America. Literally baked into our founding documents. It’s called the “Foreign Emoluments Clause” and it’s pretty damned clear:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Now, where in this does a Boeing 747-8 Airliner valued at approximately $400 million, “given” to the United States Air Force for “free” (only needing a skin-and-spars level remanufacturing process), then to be “given” to the “Trump Presidential Library” in 2029 at the end of his term, fall in this spectrum? Clearly it has some value; I mean, as the President said, “I could be a stupid person and say no”. And for a 13-year old, executive-outfitted flying (electronic) bug collection shaped like a 747 that is in no way outfitted to Doomsday-spec, that’s probably a heck of a bargain. I mean, how much could it really cost to add in-flight refueling, military-grade ECM, a comm suite capable of talking to submerged SSBNs on the other side of the planet through a nuclear exchange and maybe that cool little armored escape pod and parachute ramp from the 1997 movie? I mean, why not?

Now, this wouldn’t be an issue if it was being gifted to the Air Force, without the end goal of going to the “Trump Library”. Might not be a sensible investment, but it wouldn’t be an obvious bribe. Likewise, this wouldn’t be an issue at all if Congress had a chance to ratify the arrangement, to ensure that there was no blatant personal profit to the President. But we don’t get (captive Republican Congressional) approval. We get Pam Bondi, famous Trump sycophant and Qatari foreign representative, to write a reasoned legal opinion that it’s all good because it’s going to the USAF on the way to Trump. I wonder if it’ll have pre-loaded Signal chats for Pete Hegseth in the luxury Corinthian leather recliners?

At the end of the day, it ain’t about the plane at all. The USAF will make sure the airframe is sound, the NSA and DIA and USAF counter-intel will have a field day stripping it down to its constituent parts and removing the bugs, and Tony’s Discount Carpet and Recliners will make a lot of money converting Qatari cream-and-gold to Trumpian faux-Versailles vibes. It’ll do fine, normal work as a temporary Air Force 1- remember that FDR flew in some sketchy shit back in the day and didn’t die. It’s about the image of integrity and the perception, however thin, that the United States of America and the man who leads it needs the charity of some Middle Eastern sultan. That’s the thing with gifts…if it’s from a business partner or a stranger or whatnot, it is the perception of indebtedness, of a favor, of a power imbalance. Trump might genuinely look at a cool, luxurious airplane for free and see a great deal. Maybe he doesn’t care about riding bitch in someone else’s whip. But the rest of humanity is going to see Donald John Trump riding poor-bitch in someone else’s whip, that he couldn’t afford, and had to have given to him because he can’t get his shit together. In this man’s world, that’s not the flex it sounds like.

Fun fact: “Trump” and “scrub” are both five-letter words for “whiny, annoying bitch that can’t get laid and has to bask in the reflected coolness of other people because they have none of their own.”

At least it’s not a crappy-ass motor coach.