U.S. President Donald Trump arrives aboard the new Qatari-gifted Air Force One, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., July 9, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Conservative columnist Jim Geraghty is telling President Donald Trump that it's time to cut his losses on the plane gift.
Writing for The Washington Post on Tuesday, Geraghty said that the hundreds of millions are being spent on what he called "Qatar Force One" to retrofit it for security and safety.
Debuting the plane, Trump rambled that only Qatar could build a plane like that and that the U.S. couldn't.
“Frankly, we couldn’t build a plane like this because we wouldn’t be willing to spend the kind of money necessary. They spent top dollar,” said Trump.
Geraghty called it "cringe-inducing," in large part because it is a U.S.-made plane. Furthermore, the U.S. government has spent at least $400 million to retrofit it, according to public statements by the administration. Estimates suggest the price tag to make the Boeing plane safe enough for a president would likely be closer to $1 billion, NBC News reported in 2025.
"Even if you could close your eyes to the ethical problems, you had to wonder how secure a plane from Qatar was. (You know who used to work in the Qatari Water Department? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11.) If you doubt that accepting an unsolicited large-scale gift can lead to bigger problems, check out that new movie about how accepting a big wooden horse worked out for ancient Troy," wrote Geraghty.
The security issue wasn't lost on former FBI agent and national security expert Juliette Kayyem, who told CNN on Monday that the plane should never have been "upgraded" to begin with.
Trump was forced to return to the old Air Force One after leaving Türkiye and flying to the U.K. It has now been sidelined, Trump said, so it could be "maxed out." It's unknown whether the plane will ever be safe enough, by Secret Service standards, to shuttle the president around, but Kayyem suspected it would not. While it was a gift to the United States, Trump claimed he would be using it as a "bridge plane" because the new planes he ordered in 2018 won't be ready until 2028.
Trump was "embarrassed" by the reporting that the plane wasn't ready for prime time. Since then, Trump put FBI Director Kash Patel in charge of investigating reporters who found out about the plane flub.
"Ah," wrote Geraghty. "The Qatari plane wasn’t completely safe, as the administration insisted."
He complained that it never should have been accepted to begin with.
"A whole lot of people, on both sides of the aisle, warned that it was a terrible idea. Only the president’s vanity drove this decision," Geraghty said. "The best thing to do would be to give the plane back to Qatar with a Post-it note that says 'Thanks, but no thanks.' (Trump wants to transfer the plane to his presidential library after he leaves office.)"
Trump's highest standards demand a more attractive private plane for his travels, but he'll have to make do with the plane every other president has used.
"It is better than the U.S. president flying around in a Qatari plane while gushing about how the Qataris build better planes than Americans do and waving away concerns about antimissile systems," closed Geraghty.
When news broke about the plane in the spring of 2025, a pool was done by Harvard CAPS/Harris showing that 62 percent of registered voters agreed that accepting the plane “raises ethical concerns about corruption.”