There are many good reasons why President Trump should not accept a plane from Qatar, and on today’s edition of The Editors, Rich and Co. lay out a few of them.

“We often have this debate during the Trump years, but previously too, about the bounds between legality and propriety,” says Noah, “where maybe something is legal or not necessarily 100 percent legal, but you want to test the bounds of it. But should you?”

Noah points out, “This one is pretty cut and dried. It’s hard to think of something that more closely comports within an emolument as envisioned by the Founders. . . . The very fact that it was floated at all without any concern for the obvious impropriety of it is its own scandal.”

Charlie says that even if this was gift from a strong U.S. ally, maybe “by say, Britain, a country we like, a country that shares most of our values with which we are allied and have had a long and fruitful relationship, it’s still grotesque, isn’t it? Not because there’s anything wrong with Britain, not because there’s anything wrong with the plane, not because even then you could say, ‘Well, it’s blurring the line between being a gift for the American government and a gift for the president.’ But because this ought to be an American concern from start to finish.

“To be contacted by a foreign country and have them give us this . . . just makes America seem in my eyes like a second-rate power.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.