When it comes to his Air Force One jetliner, President Donald Trump is suffering from some serious fuselage envy these days.

It seems that wherever he flies, his aging Boeing 747 comes up short compared to newer, bigger, flashier planes flown by lesser heads of state.

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“Compared to the new plane of the equivalent stature … it’s not even the same ballgame,” Trump said last month. “You look at some of the Arab countries and the planes they have parked alongside of the United States of America plane, it’s like from a different planet.”

During his first term, Trump thought he pulled off a genius deal by convincing Boeing to sell the Air Force two brand-new 747s that were destined for a bankrupt Russian airline to speed up delivery.

At the time, Trump boasted that the $3.9 billion fixed-price contract saved taxpayers $1.6 billion over the cost of building the modified version of the 747 from scratch.

It was a deal Boeing and Trump came to regret.

It turns out that retrofitting a commercial airliner to the specifications required by essentially a flying situation room was way more complicated than expected.

Boeing lost $2.5 billion on what it admitted was a project that carried too much risk, and, as with many Pentagon programs, it was soon bedeviled by cost overruns and unforeseen problems.

“They had to strip those planes that were built for another purpose down to the studs, and … the contractor who was doing the interior work went out of business,” Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT) said at a June 5 House hearing. “Boeing has had to kind of figure out a plan to do the fitting out of the interior of the plane.”

The twin planes, originally promised by 2024, now won’t be delivered until 2027 or 2028 at the earliest.

Trump was hopping mad.

“We have a problem with Boeing,” Trump told Fox News anchor Bret Baier. “Now, again, it’s a very complex plane. It’s a much different plane than a normal plane would be … But I’m angry about them for the two planes. They should be able to knock them off in no time.”

Frustrated that he was stuck flying an almost 40-year-old, early model 747, Trump began looking around for a temporary replacement.

His Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, was tasked with approaching the Qatari royal family about obtaining a 13-year-old luxury 747 that the Gulf ally had been trying to sell since 2020.

In February, the Qataris flew the plane to an airport near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, Florida, resort for his inspection.

It was love at first sight.

One reason the plane hadn’t sold was that there isn’t much of a market for a “flying palace,” with limited seating for only 89 passengers and expensive idiosyncratic appointments. These include, according to a sales brochure obtained by Forbes, “two bedrooms, entertainment and meeting rooms, and a sumptuous beige and cream-colored interior created by the Parisian design house Cabinet Pinto that features furnishings made of sycamore and wakapou wood, silk fabrics, and natural leather.”

While ostensibly the U.S. was inquiring about purchasing the ultraluxury plane, Witkoff reportedly made clear a donation would be much appreciated, and the Qataris obliged.

“It’s a perfectly legal, government-to-government, Department of Defense to Department of Defense transaction that happens in the normal course,” Witkoff told ABC News, after the plane was accepted as a gift in late May. “They decided to donate something because of all the wonderful things that we’ve done for them in the past.”

Trump bristles whenever anyone questions the propriety of the deal or whether the Qatari plane, valued at between $200 million and $400 million, will end up costing as much as a billion dollars to retrofit.

“I could be a stupid person and say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’ But I thought it was a great gesture,” Trump said during an Oval Office appearance.

“They’re giving the United States Air Force a jet, OK? And it’s a great thing,” he said at another.

It’s unclear how quickly L3Harris Technologies will be able to convert the luxury jet into a flying command center, a process that would normally take as long as five years and cost upward of a billion dollars.

“You’ve got to install encrypted communication technology. You have to harden the defenses. You have to put countermeasures in there. Obviously, it’s a flying situation room,” said Courtney when questioning Trump’s new Air Force secretary, Troy Meink, at a House hearing this month.

“Based on the experience we already have gone through with retrofitting planes, 747s, it’s clear that this is going to be a drain on the Air Force’s budget,” Courtney said. “It’s clear that this new third plane is going to cost well over $1 billion. I mean you can’t retrofit a plane that’s built for another purpose for Air Force One and expect it to be a free plane.”

Meink testified that the cost would be less than $400 million, and that the billion-dollar figure being tossed around would include “costs that we’d have experienced anyway.”

“We will just experience them early, buying additional platforms for training, for spares, things like that, are actually the majority of that amount,” Meink said.

Critics wonder if the Air Force might cut corners, leaving off some critical systems and not completely redoing the luxurious interior to save time and money and to meet Trump’s timeline.

“Do I have your commitment that you will advise the president not to reduce any requirements that will lower operational security for any aircraft to be used as Air Force One?” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) asked Meink at a May 20 hearing.

“Yeah. Senator, I will,” he replied.

The Pentagon’s refusal to give a hard number for the cost is fueling suspicion that the lowball public estimate for the retrofit is an effort to hide something.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) got into a contentious back-and-forth with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a hearing when the secretary refused to discuss details of the Qatari jet acquisition in an open session.

When Reed asked for the price of the contract to overhaul the plane, Hegseth said, “That cannot be revealed in this setting, sir.”

“Why can’t it be revealed in this setting?” Reed shot back. “This is the Appropriation Committee of the United States Senate. We appropriate the money that you will spend after it’s authorized by my committee. And you cannot tell us how much the contract is for?”

Hegseth replied, “You will have that number, senator. It just can’t be talked about in public.”

Trump has said from the beginning that the plane was not given to him but to the Air Force and that when he leaves office, he expects it to be transferred to his presidential library, in the same way a retired Air Force One was donated to former President Ronald Reagan’s presidential library.

In theory, that could make it available for use by Trump and his family, which is a clear violation of the emoluments clause that bars gifts to the president without Congress’s approval.

Trump insists he has no plans to use the flying palace after returning to private life.

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“It would go directly to the library after I leave office,” he told reporters. “I wouldn’t be using it. No.”

But that, as Mary Poppins would say, is a “pie crust promise, easily made, easily broken.”