Donald Trump is scheduled to fly to South Dakota on a $400 million jet gifted by the government of Qatar, then attend an enormous Mount Rushmore fireworks display on Friday. The trip puts two of his biggest current flashpoints on the same calendar: the plane paid for with public money to retrofit, and a memorial show going ahead despite cautions about fire risk.
The fireworks are expected to draw attention because they appear to be largely for Trump’s benefit, since he will be in attendance. The Memorial had an 11-year ban on fireworks until the Trump administration suspended it in 2020, and this year’s show is being staged in the Black Hills National Forest area where fire concerns remain part of the backdrop.
The plane behind the trip is a Qatari-gifted Boeing 747-8 that has already required hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for communications and security upgrades, along with a massive $320 million custom hangar at Joint Base Andrews. It is expected to be used for about two years, until long-delayed jets ordered directly from Boeing arrive later. In other words, a jet presented as a gift is carrying a price tag that keeps rising long after the ribbon was cut.
That is where the politics sharpen. Anna Kelly said there are no conflicts of interest, even as the aircraft is described as a $400 million gift that will remain in temporary government possession until Trump leaves office, when it becomes the property of his library. Trump himself has framed it as a prize the United States could not build, calling it a gift from a country that has treated the U.S. very well and saying, “You can low-key it. Or you can show it.”
The unanswered question is not whether the plane will fly or whether the fireworks will light the sky. It is what Qatar expected in return, and how long taxpayers will keep paying for a jet that is supposed to serve only briefly before ending up elsewhere.
