U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as he hosts a dinner with farmers in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 25, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci
The White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner will be held tonight (after being cut short in April by a gunman). Once again, Trump will be on the dais, and his speech will be the main event.
But the highlight of the evening will be the award for “the most fair, impartial, objective news reporting” by a member of the White House press corps, which will be going to TheNew York Times’ Tyler Pager.
Pager is one of the Times journalists subpoenaed by Trump’s FBI to force the paperto reveal confidential sources behind its story about Trump’s Qatari-donated jumbo replacement for Air Force One. (A district judge has delayed enforcing the subpoenas.)
The backstory is that since returning to the White House, Trump has complained about the “look” of Air Force One. He was upset that other countries have newer planes that are “bigger and sleeker and sharper,” he told Fox News. “It doesn’t look right.” Of course, Trump wants the biggest, sleekest, and sharpest.
So in May of 2025 he accepted Qatar’s “gift” of a Boeing 747-8 jetliner, reportedly worth some $400 million. Trump described it as a gift to the United States (the Constitution prohibits gifts from foreign powers to presidents), but that’s rubbish. Trump says he intends to keep it for his presidential library (it’s hard to imagine a giant jumbo jet in a library or as a library) and post-presidential plaything.
The Qatari jumbo jet is intimately tied to Trump’s jumbo ego. Trump boasts that it will be “a flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody’s ever seen before,” adding, “Now when we land at airports in London and Germany and different places, nobody tops this one.”
He’s emphasized that it won’t cost taxpayers a dime, and would be easy to “bring it up to the presidential standards, meaning security wise.”
But the actual cost to taxpayers of retrofitting it to “presidential standards” has been between $400 million and $1 billion so far — more than the jet was worth in the first place. And it’s still not there, “security wise.”
Which brings us to the Times report, which drove Trump nuts. It said he had to fly out of Turkey (where the NATO summit was held) on the old Air Force One instead of his new Qatari-donated jumbo jet because the Qatari jet still didn’t have sufficient security, including antimissile capabilities.
According to CNN, Trump was “fuming,” “embarrassed and angry” by the Times story. It made him look bad, even stupid. What kind of a businessman would describe a $400 million jet as “free” and then charge taxpayers more than $400 million to have it ready to fly? Even now, it’s not ready.
Trying to make the story appear as a threat to national security, Trump instructed FBI director Kash Patel and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to oversee a leak investigation. These are his top guns. Patel was even summoned to the White House and reportedly worked on it for eight hours.
Trump is paranoid that someone with knowledge that could embarrass him would be so disloyal as to leak it.
Subpoenas were sent to the homes of Times journalists who reported the story —including Tyler Pager. Other subpoenas went to the journalists’ phone service providers, seeking phone and text-messaging records for the journalists and their spouses. Rarely in history has the White House and FBI been mobilized like this.
But the threat here has nothing whatever to do with national security. Trump has even publicly admitted that the jet still has to be “maxed” for security.
No, the threat here is to Trump’s giant ego. His humongous ego is why he always has to fly in the biggest and the best plane — such as the Qatari jumbo jet. His ego is also why he hates to be the brunt of jokes by late night comedians, who’ve had a field day with Trump and his not-quite-ready Qatari jet.
And his paranoid ego is why Trump can’t stand the possibility that anyone in the White House, Pentagon, or Secret Service might have revealed to journalists his utter stupidity.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
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