The Framers were not concerned about transparency. The Constitution bars foreign gifts, not concealing foreign gifts.

In seeking to defend his indefensible acceptance of a $400 million “palace in the sky” Boeing 747-8 aircraft from his new friends in Qatar’s sharia supremacist regime, the president and his flacks again demonstrate that they don’t grasp the concepts of constitutional duty and conflicts of interest. (This lack of comprehension — or, better, this excess of insouciance — is a leitmotif of the Trump family crypto venture, on which I’m in the midst of a series of columns.)

Qatar is probably second only to Iran when it comes to state sponsorship of jihadist terrorism, and thus, naturally, was made a major non-NATO ally by the Biden administration. Yet, the president insists that the gift from this foreign regime is nothing to be alarmed about because he plans to accept this largesse “in a very public and transparent action.”

But see, that’s the thing about the appearance of impropriety that animates concerns about conflicts of interest: It appears. A major part of the influence the benefactor has over the beneficiary is that the gift is public. That enhances the benefactor’s prestige and capacity to coerce. No one knows this better than Qatar, which, as Eli Lake and Amine Ayoub detail, has made a habit of buying influence from American officials, executives, and universities, and thus spreading their repulsive ideology.

This is why conflicts-of-interest rules do not say the potentially corrupting transaction must be disclosed; they say do not engage in the potentially corrupting transaction.

The Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause (art. I, §9, cl. 8) does not call for “public and transparent action.” It prohibits any person holding a federal office of public trust, very much including the president, from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatsoever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

There is an exception: the officeholder may accept gifts from a foreign power if Congress consents. President Trump could lawfully have his opulent Qatari plane if he could convince lawmakers to approve it. But of course, they wouldn’t approve it, both because it’s Qatar and because it’s outrageous that the United States of America, the most formidable air power in history, should have to obtain a conveyance for the commander-in-chief from any foreign power, let alone a despotic Gulf regime whose major export, besides dollars for Hamas, is an anti-American, anti-Western, antisemitic, counter-constitutional ideology.

Since Trump wants his new toy, and is ballistic that the planned upgrade of Air Force One won’t be ready until at least 2027, he has no intention of asking Congress’s permission. (Asking permission is not how this administration rolls, the Constitution’s significant limits on executive authority notwithstanding.)

The Framers were not worried about transparency. They were worried about foreign powers purchasing suasion over the office of the presidency. “One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages,” wrote Hamilton in Federalist No. 22, “is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption.” He elaborated that in republics, people from the community are raised to prominence and power, and unless they are “animated and guided by superior virtue,” they may be vulnerable to foreign enticements. “Hence it is that history furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalency of foreign corruption in republican governments.”

Publicity about compromising arrangements makes them only worse. Hamilton recalled that in Sweden, during the then-recent 1772 bloodless coup by which King Gustav III usurped parliamentary power,

the parties were alternately bought by France and England in so barefaced and notorious a manner that it excited universal disgust in the nation, and was a principal cause that the most limited monarch in Europe, in a single day, without tumult, violence, or opposition, became one of the most absolute and uncontrolled.

The peril of corruption by foreign regimes is no less perilous by dint of its being played out in the open.

Other rationalizations on offer by the administration are ridiculous. Reportedly, Attorney General Pamela Bondi, who was a lucratively compensated lobbyist for Qatar from 2020 into 2022, has advised the White House Counsel and the Defense Department that the transfer is legitimate because (a) it does not violate bribery laws since it is not conditioned on any official act, (b) the plane is technically being donated to the United States government, rather than to the president, and (c) the plane will ultimately be turned over to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation, not retained by the government.

Sheesh. First, to trigger the Emoluments clause, it is not necessary that the essential elements of a criminal bribery prosecution be satisfied. The Constitution prohibits gifts, not bribes. The Framers were worried about corruption caused by foreign influence, not whether a particular transfer might satisfy the standards for a bribery conviction (torturously explicated by McDonnell v. United States (2016)).

Second, the Qatari regime plans to provide the plane for the benefit of President Trump, who has complained about the inadequacy of the current Air Force One, and who toured the Qatari plane when it was recently parked in Palm Beach to determine whether it would be suitable for his use.

Finally, the fact that the aircraft would ultimately be transferred to Trump in his post-presidency only underscores that it is a gift to him personally. The likelihood is that the plane would replace Trump’s current private plane (“Trump Force One”), which was almost 20 years old when he bought it in 2011 and is not nearly as lavish as the newer Qatari plane said to be on offer.

Not surprisingly, the reaction to the reported gift has been so uniformly negative that Qatar – one of the three Gulf countries Trump chose to visit on his big Middle East trip this week – is pushing back. The sheikhs of Doha now say that no transfer of an airplane, whether as a gift or by some other agreement, has been finalized. That may be news to the president, who has taken to Truth Social to defend the transfer as “a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE” – one he laughably says is going to “the Defense Department” rather than himself.

I’d like to say we’ve never seen anything like this before. Instead, it’s par for the course – like the one the Trump company just agreed to build in Qatar.