It may not always seem like it, but I try to be generous editorially, really I do.

I don’t get up every morning and think, “Gosh, I can’t wait to satirize the President of the United States.” Ideally, I couldn’t find cause to lampoon the president on a daily basis. SNL aside, the leader of the free world’s not supposed to be a standing joke.

But when I hear Donald Trump say things like, “We’re the United States of America, I believe that we should have the most impressive plane,” it occurs to me that I’d be derelict not to jeer.

America doesn’t have to have “the most impressive plane” to make an impression. The President of the United States by virtue of being — wait for it — The President of the United States, could show up in a Cessna 150 and still command the same reverence and deference than if he (or she) showed up in the starship Enterprise.

Trump doesn’t understand why that’s the case. And the fact that he doesn’t is a testament to why he shouldn’t hold the office of the presidency.

With that in mind, Pete Hegseth on Wednesday accepted delivery of that godforsaken 747-8 from Qatar which, after some modifications, will serve as Trump’s presidential plane until Boeing gets around to finishing new Air Force Ones.

If you didn’t read “Royals Bearing Gifts” last week, I encourage you to read it today. Suffice to say the only thing more absurd than accepting a $400 million payoff from the Middle East’s most notorious double-dealers is the assertion that it’s not a payoff, but rather a generous gift from a US ally.

Qatar’s no one’s ally. They’re an independent franchise, if you like. And they harbor Hamas’s political wing in the lap of luxury. America’s arresting students for penning pro-Palestine editorials while the president takes delivery of a luxury jet from a cabal of scheming royals who put Hamas’s politburo up in gleaming skyscrapers. What kind of message does that send?

The Pentagon on Wednesday said it’ll ensure “proper security measures are considered” for the aircraft which’ll be “modif[ied] for executive airlift.” Part of me wants to say there was too much scrutiny around this transfer for Qatar to risk bugging the plane. But then again, anybody would bug it! Everyone spies on everyone else. Including, and sometimes especially, allies. If this plane were “donated” by Canada, it’d still constitute a national security risk. Qatar’s not Canada.

I went over all of that last week, so I won’t rehash it here. What I want to emphasize today is the extent to which this demonstrates Trump’s obliviousness to how America actually derives its international sway.

Trump has eliminated, or tried to eliminate, dozens of programs that cost America next to nothing (relative to total US spending in a given year) but which accrue to the US as a vast reservoir of soft power. Cutting USAID, for example, has irreparably damaged America’s reputation in any number of locales where that assistance was the only thing standing between life and death for stricken locals.

Simply put: The decision to “feed USAID into the wood chipper,” as Elon Musk infamously put it, was a singularly egregious squandering of global influence and goodwill, and thereby an own goal of potentially catastrophic proportions.

You can say the same of Trump’s bid to silence Radio Free Europe. Let me dwell on that. A handful of readers still don’t get the Weeklies, which means some of you didn’t read the April 12 dispatch on US soft power. I’m going to recycle some color from that Weekly to make the point.

The hallmark of US soft power (or anyone’s soft power) is a high, but not always quantifiable, ROI. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s a good example. Congress appropriated around $150 million for RFE/RL in 2025, which is to say a pittance. As The Atlantic Council noted, 2024’s RFE/RL budget was “slightly less than the cost of three Apache helicopters, the same type of aircraft that was lost in large numbers over two decades of war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, with little lasting progress to show for it.”

The Trump administration attempted to unilaterally terminate RFE/RL’s funding grant, which would’ve more or less shuttered the initiatives. The Kremlin was delighted. Upon hearing the news, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, a veritable James Bond villain, declared, “Today is a holiday for me and my colleagues at RT and Sputnik. This is an awesome decision by Trump!” “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately,” she went on. “But America did so itself.”

While it’s not possible to put a dollar value on the returns which accrue to Washington from RFE/RL and Voice of America, it’s safe to say $150 million’s a bargain for an American monopoly on non-state news broadcasts to people living under some of the most oppressive regimes on Earth.

It’s that kind of soft power which won the Cold War for America. That isn’t lost on the Kremlin, nor on Beijing. When Trump, acting through Kari Lake, moved to shutter VOA, a Chinese Communist Party which could scarcely believe its own luck jeered, “The so-called beacon of freedom has been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.”

It’s not just RFE/RL, VOA and USAID. Since Inauguration Day, Trump’s moved to dismantle the entire scaffolding of American soft power built over seven decades. To reiterate: It’s painfully obvious that this administration has no conception whatever of how America actually wields power and holds sway throughout the world.

In Trump’s mind, the US gets a bigger return in terms of enhanced global prestige from ensuring the President of the United States has the most luxurious plane than from funding the fight against disease, poverty and oppression through foreign aid and initiatives like RFE and VOA.

That couldn’t be more wrong-headed. No one cares whether Air Force One’s the most luxurious plane on the tarmac. If anything, world leaders are going to laugh at Trump when he shows up in a half-billion-dollar flying bribe.

Qatar’s gone out of its way to defend itself against accusations it’s trying to buy influence. The royal excuses aren’t especially convincing, nor are they comforting.

Last week, for example, Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani explained to CNN that if Qatar wanted to give Trump $400 million under the table, there are plenty of ways to do that which don’t involve gifting him a 747 in full view of the US electorate.

“We would not do anything illegal,” he said. “I mean, if there was something illegal here, there would be many ways to hide these kind of transactions where they would not be visible to the public.”

Somehow, that doesn’t make me feel any better.