Trump’s decision to accept the ‘gift’ of a private jet from Qatar brings to mind Tina Brown’s affecting essay on private air travel.

Tina Brown’s career editing America’s most prominent magazines during the heyday of glossy publishing affords her a unique degree of insight into the country’s rich and powerful.

Through her work, Brown had a front row view into their frictionless existence, though as a journalist — albeit an extremely successful one — she never quite joined their ranks, allowing her a critical distance.

Brown put that insight to good use last year in an eye-opening essay for her excellent Substack diary, Fresh Hell, explaining the corrupting power of private air travel and the role that influence played in the Jeffrey Epstein saga:

I have sometimes pondered the pivotal moment when money changes people forever. The answer is, without doubt, the acquisition of the private plane — it’s the moment when you leave the human race forever. And having just flown back on JetBlue Mosaic from the Dominican Republic, sitting next to an enormous Russian chomping plantain chips, I attest wholeheartedly that it’s a loss of connection not to be regretted.

So it is no surprise to me that Bill Clinton, in his new memoir Citizen: My Life After the White House, ascribes his dependence on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane to the travel needs of the Clinton Foundation. Who else is going to put his Boeing 727 at the service of an ex-president to fly around to what our soon-to-be 47th president once called “shithole countries” than a pedophile like Epstein in desperate need of adding sheen to his slime? In 2002, Epstein picked up Clinton in Siberia on the “Lolita Express” and flew him to a U.S. naval base in Japan, which hardly sounds like the thrumming locus of nubile orgies.

Brown’s affecting essay, which is worth reading in its entirety, came to mind as I was pondering President Trump’s decision to accept the “gift” of a $400 million jet from the Qatari government, that friend of Islamist despots and terrorists.

Why would Trump, who as president has access to private taxpayer-funded air travel and will presumably resume using his own private plane after leaving office, accept such an obviously corrupt gesture? It’s simple, as Trump put it on Tuesday while flying aboard Air Force One, the jet he was then traveling in was “much smaller, much less impressive” than those on offer from his new friends.

In Trump’s defense, Air Force One is nearly 40 years old — imagine the indignity of being forced to fly in a relic like that!

Having “left the human race forever” with the purchase of his own private plane decades ago, flying on Air Force One is now for Trump what flying economy becomes for those ex-CEOs and former presidents who lose the keys to their private jets and are thus forced to, as Brown puts it, return to “the armpit of mass transit.”

Brown wrote her essay in December of last year, but in her last line, she could have been describing the events of this week:

Name me the purehearted billionaire who wants nothing in return. There is no greater hazard than the offer of a Gulfstream to foster dubious associations with influence-seeking Saudi potentates, borderline Kazakh shysters, odious oligarchs, and the rest of the cast of incorrigibles—and land you on the cover of the New York Post.