Prominent right-wing influencers Ben Shapiro, Laura Loomer, and Mark Levin have rebuked US President Trump for his willingness to accept a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet as a gift from the ruling family of Qatar.
Their criticism shows a rare crack in Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, which takes a more isolationist stance than traditional Republicans and criticizes their willingness to intervene in world affairs in support of allies like Ukraine and Israel.
“Taking sacks of goodies from people who support Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jazeera, all the rest — that’s not America first,” said Shapiro, who lit a torch in Israel’s Independence Day ceremony last month, on his podcast this week.
Loomer tweeted that she would “take a bullet” for Trump but pointed out what she said was a contradiction between his accepting a gift from Qatar and his policy agenda.
“How are we supposed to ever see the US under the Trump admin designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization if the US is now going to accept a $400 million jet from Qatar to fly the US President and his staff around on?” she wrote.
Loomer noted that Trump had signed an executive order last month requiring US educational institutions to disclose the source of their funding as a means to combat foreign influence.
Levin said Qatar’s money should not give it influence.
“Their jet and all the other things they are buying in our country does not provide them with the cover they seek,” he tweeted.
The Qatari government said Tuesday that a final decision hadn’t been made on the move. Trump defended the idea — which would amount to a US president accepting an astonishingly valuable gift from a foreign government — as a fiscally smart move for the country.
Trump intends to convert the Qatari aircraft into a plane he can fly on as president, with the US Air Force planning to add secure communications and other classified elements to it, but it will have more limited capabilities than the existing planes that were built to serve as Air Force One, the Associated Press reported.
Trump’s political rivals have bashed him for the potential gift, with Democrats demanding an investigation into the transaction. Many of his supporters have expressed mild criticism but emphasized they remain loyal to the president, Axios reported.