Why Trump's so sensitive about Air Force One
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According to Donald Trump, nobody has ever seen anything like it. The new, retrofitted Air Force One, which was gifted to the US president by Qatar, had all the bells and whistles, he said. So when the New York Times reported that security concerns forced Trump to abandon the new plane and use the old one, the president wasn't happy. Today, staff writer at The Atlantic, David A. Graham, on the latest attack on the press. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
David, why don't we start our conversation back in May last year... when you and other journalists had an inkling that Trump was about to accept a rather lavish gift from Qatar. Remind me about that.
Yeah, that's right. The president started talking about the idea that he was going to receive a 747 from the Emirate of Qatar.
You know, we're very disappointed that it's taking Boeing so long to build a new Air Force One. You know, we have an Air Force One that's 40 years old. If we can get a 747 as a contribution to our Defense Department, I think that was a very nice suggestion.
And this is something Trump has been sort of concerned about Air Force One for some time. He thinks that the planes that the president flies on are not up to snuff, either in terms of their modern design or the outside decor.
I said to myself, you know, these countries, they have a lot of respect for us, a lot. And yet they have a A plane that's much better and much newer. It's a little ridiculous out there.
And it's been a slow process to replace them. And he got sick of waiting, basically, and wanted to accept this gift as a kind of interim Air Force One.
And as he noted at the time, the astonishing thing about this was that the president was doing it out in the open. He wasn't hiding any of this.
Right. And it was unclear whether it was being given as a gift to the nation or to Trump personally and how it would work legally if it was a gift to Trump personally. There was some suggestion that rather than becoming part of the national fleet. It would go to Trump's presidential library and museum when he left office. So there were all of these very weird questions about why you would take a multi-hundred-million-dollar gift from a foreign country and why that would possibly be proper.
And then, of course, Donald Trump, he does accept this plane, saying it would have been stupid not to.
Now, I could be a stupid person and say, oh, no, we don't want a free plane. We give free things out. We'll take one, too.
But straightaway, there is concern about security. It's thought so much could go wrong.
That's right. I mean, these planes are incredibly complicated, even for modern airliners, which are, of course, complicated themselves. Air Force One has a variety of complicated defense systems and communications tools that And also any airplane has a lot of space in which you can hide bugs or other sort of security issues. And so there's some question of how the U.S. intelligence services and defense establishment would guarantee that this plane was clean, so to speak, and safe and not a security risk.
So the White House, it gets this plane and then it retrofits it. And a job that should take years from all reports takes about 10 months. So just tell me, David, before we move on, do we know what it's like inside? I assume there's a bit of gold.
You know, I actually haven't seen a great deal of images inside, but that is always Trump's aesthetic. There's a lot of leather. I've seen some pictures of bookshelves. So it's meant to look very fancy and very high-minded.
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