The first thing I ever said to Donald Trump was about Air Force One. When we met for an interview, in the spring of 2021, in the lobby of his Mar-a-Lago club, the only visible sign of his time in office was sitting on the coffee table in front of us—a model of his proposed new Presidential plane, complete with a revamped, navy-blue-and-red color scheme in place of the distinctive baby-blue exterior featured on the aircraft since J.F.K.’s era. It was a strange, oddly public setting for an interview, with club members strolling by and gawking on their way to drinks or dinner, but that’s how Trump liked it. He was an unwilling exile in Florida, only a few months removed from his failed attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat, and he had replaced the daily spectacle of the White House with this far more modest show for his paying customers. After I noted the model airplane, Trump launched into a fond and factually questionable recollection of how he had bargained Boeing down from $5.7 billion for a two-plane deal to provide an updated ride befitting America’s Commander-in-Chief. “I said, ‘It has to have a three on the front,’ ” Trump recalled of the negotiations. “ ‘It has to have a three.’ ” The final agreed-upon price with Boeing, which the Pentagon signed off on in 2018, was $3.9 billion.

But why, I wondered, did he feel so strongly about the upgrade? The answer, it turned out, was simple, and it had nothing to do with national security: Trump had a bad case of plane envy. “Air Force One is now thirty-one years old,” he said. “People come in from, especially the Middle East countries, with brand-new 747-800s, the brand-new super-duper-new one, and we have planes that are thirty-one years old.” He recalled going to global summits and looking out his window at the airport tarmac: “I would say, ‘Whose plane is that?’ ‘That’s Saudi Arabia’s plane.’ ‘That’s U.A.E.’s plane.’ And you’d see a brand-new 747, and I’d say, ‘Well, the United States should be properly represented.’ ”

This wasn’t just a passing twinge of jealousy. By now, everyone knows about this obsession of Trump’s. Boeing has yet to deliver the planes that Trump negotiated for—they were due in 2024, but are now running years late and billions of dollars behind schedule. Trump’s response to this, revealed by ABC News this week, was to accept the gift of a four-hundred-million-dollar Boeing 747-8—a “palace in the sky”—from the government of Qatar. The idea is for the jet to serve as a new Air Force One and, apparently, for Trump to keep it after he leaves office. This, not surprisingly, has generated perhaps the Trumpiest Trump scandal ever, made worse by the timing, on the eve of the first major Presidential trip of his second term, to Qatar and two other Middle Eastern countries. Back in Washington, even a few Republicans have complained, a rarity in this age of egregious Trump excess, and it now seems that the free airplane could cost U.S. taxpayers a billion dollars and take years to upgrade with the security features required to protect an American leader. Trump has dismissed the criticism as “stupid.”

The grift is, of course, unmistakable. It was, after all, Trump’s Attorney General and former personal lawyer, Pam Bondi, previously a registered lobbyist for the government of Qatar, who signed off on the legal opinion saying that it was totally fine for him to accept what’s likely the largest foreign gift to America in history. So are the optics—Trump, our most shallow, status-obsessed President, covets the plane because it is the showiest possible proof of wealth and power. Why shouldn’t he have a plane as nice as those of the sheikhs, whose gaudy aesthetic and unconstrained powers he so admires? But it’s more than that, too. I’ve been thinking all week of that conversation years ago in Mar-a-Lago: Getting a new Air Force One is not merely a sign of Trump’s greed, hubris, and indifference to even the most basic ethical norms; for him, it’s also a symbol of what he tried and failed to do in his first term. In Trump’s do-over Presidency, what matters most is getting done what he could not the first time around, whether it’s eliminating “deep-state” enemies in the federal bureaucracy or cutting a peace deal to finally earn him a Nobel Peace Prize. Which enemies? Which peace deal? I’m not sure it matters all that much to him, just that it should be some enemies and some peace deal. As for the plane, look at the pictures of Trump’s redone Oval Office: after he returned to the White House in January, a model exactly like the one he brought with him to Mar-a-Lago returned to a place of honor on his Presidential coffee table. Notice had been served.

Even Trump’s itinerary for his trip to the Gulf Arab states has been a rerun, a second-time-around replay of the inaugural foreign trip of his first term, when he shocked the democratic world by choosing to go to one of the most unfree monarchies of the Middle East before making an initial visit to our friendly neighbors in Canada or Mexico, as the past few recent U.S. Presidents had done. The world is harder to shock now, but Trump keeps trying.

When he showed up in Saudi Arabia, in May of 2017, for an Arab summit, Trump famously participated in a bizarre photo op with the Saudi king, in which they placed their hands on a glowing orb as the First Lady looked on. Trump claimed that the trip was a dealmaking bonanza for the United States resulting in four hundred and fifty billion dollars in investments, though, despite the President’s puffery, one analysis found that the U.S. ended up exporting no more than ninety-two billion dollars to Saudi Arabia in the entirety of his first term. What endured from the visit was the insight into Trump’s radical shift in American foreign policy: No more, he promised his hosts, would he offer them patronizing speeches about human rights. “We are not here to lecture,” he said, offering instead a partnership “based on shared interests and values.”

Passages of his speech this week in Riyadh were so similar that they could have been cut and pasted from the original. Once again, he vowed the end of “giving you lectures on how to live” and pledged to support the people of the Middle East to chart “your own destinies in your own way.” His grievance, as Trump made clear, was more with the errors of his American predecessors than with any tyrannical policies or barbaric practices by rulers who have been known to order dissidents carved up with a bone saw or executed for same-sex sexual activity. “In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” Trump said, in a thinly veiled reference to the previous Republican President, George W. Bush, and his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

While still in Saudi Arabia, Trump met with the new leader of Syria, who, not so long ago, had been designated an Al Qaeda-linked terrorist by the U.S. government, before flying on to Qatar, where he underscored that he’s perfectly fine taking a plane from a country he once accused of funding terrorism. In Doha on Thursday morning, before flying off to Dubai, he said that he was close to making a nuclear deal with Iran, the reported terms for which sound much like the one that Trump pulled out of in 2018, when he called the signature foreign-policy agreement of Barack Obama’s Administration “a horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.” But no matter. Even the uproar among his many hard-line Iran-skeptical Republican supporters on Capitol Hill has not deterred him. At least not yet. Nor has the obvious rift that his diplomatic overtures have created with Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. I’m not surprised in the least. For Trump, a new and improved Iran deal was always the plan, even in his first term; he just never quite managed it.

What a revealing week this has been: Trump, as far as I’m concerned, is never more fully himself than when he’s in the gilded safe spaces of the Middle East—admiring the “perfecto” marble in a royal palace, basking in the judgment-free approval of fellow-billionaires, commingling his family’s and the nation’s business to a remarkable degree. His foreign-policy doctrine is not Kissingerian or Charles Lindberghian; it is not a doctrine at all, in fact, but a way of life, defined by extreme transactionalism and self-interest above all else. The cursed airplane from Qatar is not just a symbol of Trumpism but also its substance. ♦