When President Trump arrives in Qatar next week, news reports say, the oil-rich monarchy is going to bestow what could be the largest gift ever given America. It’s a used $400 million Boeing 747-8 jumbo jetliner being fitted out for an emir. Qatar will then give it to America for the president to use as Air Force One. When Mr. Trump leaves office, the aircraft would go to the Trump library for Mr. Trump’s post-presidential use.

To us the report — which was first made by ABC News — is shocking, even if Boeing is way past due in replacing the presidential plane. The Times quotes a government official as saying that the scheme “has been signed off on by government lawyers who concluded it does not violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution and that the Defense Department can accept the gift.”

Even if the lawyers are correct, the gift strikes us as an example of the principle that sometimes the scandal is not what is illegal but what is legal. We defended Mr. Trump in his first term when Democrats argued that the Constitution’s emoluments clause* — prohibiting the president from accepting gifts from foreign governments without permission of Congress — forbad his hotels from doing custom with foreign dignitaries.

That, though, was a question of conducting normal custom in an arms-length transaction at market prices. The idea of a state like Qatar, which is involved in our most sensitive negotiations in the Middle East, giving one of the world’s most luxurious aircraft to the Department of Defense to be transferred, as the president leaves office, to his private charity for his subsequent personal use, well, it just strains credulity, to put it politely. 

We say that as a newspaper that has three times endorsed Mr. Trump over the Democratic candidates he faced for president. Apart from all the niceties about what is and isn’t legal, the gift under discussion can’t be seen without the political and wartime context. This is far from an idealistic gesture like, say, that of France when it gave America the Statue of Liberty. Qatar is one of the financiers of the war against Israel and against America.

The Qataris’ gift to America for onpassing to Mr. Trump’s charity when he leaves office arrives as the scope of Qatar’s spending is starting to come into focus. It comprises billions of dollars being siphoned into American institutions of higher education. Its sovereign wealth fund has invested at least hundreds of millions of dollars in a fund, Affinity Partners, being assembled by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. 

Mr. Trump’s key negotiator on Ukraine and Iran is, in Steven Witkoff, another beneficiary of the generosity of Qatar. The Mideast nation’s Investment Authority in 2023 “dispatched $623 million as a leveraged buyout of Mr. Witkoff and his partners,” the Times reports, at a time when the developer and his partners were “in a jam.” The money was part of what the Times calls an “enormous flow of dollars” from the Mideast.

Mr. Trump is defending the transfer of the jet, averring on his Truth Social platform that “the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane.” 

The president concludes: “Anybody can do that! The Dems are World Class Losers!!!” Yet the concerns over this “gift” are unlikely to be confined to the opposition party. The Framers understood that gifts from other nations are rarely animated by unalloyed generosity. That’s an insight dating back to the days of Troy and Laocoön’s caution against being too trusting of foreign powers — “even those bearing gifts.”

________

* “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.”