President Donald Trump suggested that Qatar approached him with the possibility of gifting a luxury jet replacement for Air Force One, claiming that one Qatari official said: “If I can help you, let me do that.”
“If I wanted to, I could, you know, hurt Boeing, and I don’t want to hurt Boeing, but they are very late with the plane, and Qatar heard about it, and he’s a great leader. And we were talking, and he said, ‘If I can help you, let me do that.’ And they had a plane. Not a new plane at all, but they had a plane,” the president said in an interview that aired today on Fox News.
The president’s remarks come after he announced Sunday night on social media that the Defense Department plans to accept a Boeing 747-8 jet to replace Air Force One as a “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE.”
As CNN has previously reported, converting the luxury jet gifted by Qatar to Trump could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and it could take up two years to install the necessary security equipment, communications and defensive capabilities for it to be safely used by the commander in chief.
