May 12, 2025 (Monday)
The biggest news over the weekend was silence: the silence of Republicans. They refused to disavow White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s statement that the administration is looking at suspending the writ of habeas corpus, that is, essentially declaring martial law. They have also stayed quiet after the administration announced it was planning to accept a gift of a $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 plane from the Qatari royal family. President Donald J. Trump would use the plane as Air Force One during the rest of his presidency and take it with him when he leaves office.
This is in keeping with the refusal of 53 Republican senators to answer questions from Rolling Stone’s Ryan Bort after NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Trump, “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States, as president?” and he answered: “I don’t know.” Only Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) went on the record, posting on social media: “Following the Constitution is not a suggestion. It is a guiding force for all of us who work on behalf of the American people. Do you agree?”
It seems as if Republicans who are not on board the MAGA train are hoping the courts or reality will stop Trump’s authoritarian overreach. As Steve Vladeck noted on Friday in One First, there is “near-universal consensus…that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the President are per se unconstitutional.” In addition, Miller’s insistence that it would be appropriate to suspend the writ of habeas corpus because the United States is under attack—a position Trump echoed yesterday when he posted, “Our Country has been INVADED by 21,000,000 Illegal Aliens, many of whom are Murderers and Criminals of the Highest Order”—has failed repeatedly in court.
Reality will trip up Trump’s plan to take possession of the Qatari gift. As David Kurtz noted this morning in Talking Points Memo, retrofitting the luxury plane with the defense capabilities and security protections necessary for Air Force One will take years, not months. (Air Force One is not a specific airplane; it is the call sign given to any Air Force aircraft carrying the president of the United States).
Still, the Republicans’ silence matters. Whether Trump’s plans are all possible is not the point: he and the members of his administration are deliberately attacking the fundamental principles of our democratic republic. That lawmakers who swore an oath to uphold those principles are choosing to remain silent makes them complicit in that attack.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized that democratic government was a new departure from a world in which the world’s monarchs made deals amongst themselves. They placed strong guardrails around the behavior of future chief executives to make sure they would not sell the American people out to foreign leaders. “[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], 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,” they wrote in the Constitution. An emolument is a payment.
Until the Trump administration, the expectation was that presidents would not accept foreign gifts, let alone bribes. As Jonathan Yerushalmy of The Guardian explained today, U.S. law prohibits presidents from accepting gifts worth more than $480. Gifts worth more than that are considered a gift to the American people and are transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the same agency that oversees presidential libraries. President George W. Bush gave up a puppy that was a gift from the leader of Bulgaria. When he left office after his first term, experts estimate, Trump retained more than $250,000 worth of gifts.
Trump loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump’s top White House lawyer, David Warrington, signed off on Trump’s acceptance of the Qatari jet. They concluded it was an acceptable gift because while it will be exclusively for Trump’s use, the “flying palace” will be transferred from the Qataris to the U.S. Air Force and then to Trump’s presidential library, and that it is not tied to a specific presidential act. In 2019, Bondi was a registered lobbyist for Qatar, earning $115,000 a month.
In defending his planned acceptance of the plane, Trump turned the emoluments clause on its head. That, in turn, turned on its head the idea of a democratic republic in which the government rejects the idea of foreign leaders colluding for their own profit and reached back to that world the framers of the U.S. Constitution rejected.
He posted: “So 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. Anybody can do that! The Dems are World Class Losers!!! MAGA”
In The Bulwark, William Kristol observed: This is the voice of old-world autocracy…. Those who care that our republican government not be dependent on foreign states, that our elected leaders not take favors from foreign princes, they are losers.”
This is corruption, and not just in the sense that a government official is getting a payoff. It is corruption in the old-fashioned meaning of the term, that the body politic is being corrupted—poisoned—by a sickness that must be cured or it will be fatal. That corruption is the old-world system the framers tried to safeguard against, and it is visible anew in the relationship of the Trumps with Qatar.
The Trump family’s connections to Qatar are longstanding. In 2022 the chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, Ron Wyden (D-OR), and the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), wrote to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III, asking for information in their “ongoing investigations into whether former Senior White House Adviser Jared Kushner’s financial conflicts of interest may have led him to improperly influence U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies for his own financial gain.”
Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter and was a key presidential advisor in Trump’s first term. The letter explained that Qatar had repeatedly refused to bail out the badly leveraged Kushner property at 666 Fifth Avenue (now known as 660 Fifth Avenue) in 2018. But after Kushner talked to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the two states imposed a blockade on Qatar, Qatar suddenly threw in the necessary cash. Shortly after, the Saudi and UAE governments lifted the blockade, with Kushner taking credit for brokering the agreement.
Wyden and Maloney noted that “[t]he economic blockade of Qatar may have been used as leverage for the 666 Fifth Avenue bailout and was not supported by other officials, including the Secretaries of State and Defense.” They warned that Kushner “may have prioritized his own financial interests over the national interest. The pursuit of personal financial gain should not dictate U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies.”
In this administration the corruption is even more direct. On May 1, 2025, the Trump Organization cut a deal with Qatari Diar, a company established by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2005 to “coordinate the country’s real estate development priorities.” Together with Saudi Arabian company Dar Global, which has close ties to the Saudi government, the Qatari company will build a $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club in Qatar.
Trump heads to the Middle East tomorrow to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—three of the world’s wealthiest nations—in search of business deals.
Republicans spent the four years of Democratic president Joe Biden’s term calling to impeach him for allegedly accepting a $5 million payment from Ukraine. The source for that story later admitted to making it up and pleaded guilty of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And yet the Republicans are silent now.
After the weekend, Monday started with the administration’s announcement that it has agreed to a 90-day pause in the 145% tariffs Trump imposed on Chinese goods and on the 125% tariffs China imposed in retaliation. Both nations will cut tariffs 115% during that period, bringing the U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods to 30% and the Chinese counter tariffs to 10%. The stock market rose at the news.
While the administration hailed this as a breakthrough agreement, as economist Paul Krugman pointed out, this wasn’t a case of China backing down. China’s tariffs were a response to Trump’s, which threw the U.S. economy into a tailspin. When Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent indicated Trump wanted a way out, China agreed. Quietly scraped into the memory hole is Trump’s insistence that his high tariffs would bring old-fashioned manufacturing back to the United States.
Still, Krugman notes, a tariff of 30% on goods from China is still “really, really high.” Combined with the 10% across-the-board tariffs Trump has imposed on goods from other countries, Krugman estimates that the average tariff is up about 10% since Trump took office, from about 3% to about 13%. Krugman also notes that the tariffs have only been paused, making economic uncertainty worse. Trump appears to relish uncertainty because it keeps attention glued on him. Such uncertainty is good for television ratings but terrible for the economy, as executives cannot plan for the future.
Today Helene Cooper, Greg Jaffe, Jonathan Swan, Eric Schmitt, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Trump followed a similar pattern in his bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. He thought he could stop Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea by bombing the Houthis, and he expected results within 30 days.
After 31 days, the journalists report, the U.S. didn’t even have air superiority over the Houthis, who shot down seven U.S. drones—each of which cost about $30 million—and continued to fire at U.S. ships. In the first month, the U.S. campaign cost about $1 billion and lost two $67 million aircraft. Eager to get out, Trump agreed to stop the bombing campaign in return for the Houthis’ leaving U.S. ships alone, but without any promises from the Houthis to stop the more general attacks that had led Trump to start the U.S. strikes in the first place. On May 5, Trump ended the operations and declared victory.
For their part, the Houthis posted on social media: “Yemen defeats America.”
Since he’s so focused on loyalty and TV ratings, maybe this provides a strategy to bring down the worst members of the regime. Highlighting critical decisions being made without his knowledge and linking that to his low approval numbers would be one approach. Claiming a few members of his regime in the public eye (Miller, Hegseth, and Noem) are getting better ratings than he does might be another. Not sure if he cares if any of the grifters he’s enabled are making more money at his expense, but it’s worth a try to put that out there. After all, he still cares about his image and wants to be seen as the leader even when he is not. He was lazy the last time too, but he found plenty of time to fire those who he believed were working against his interests.
