May 22, 2025

Thursday, May 22, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.

How infantile, cruel and inappropriate can one man be!

Watch Donald J. Trump in action. Be embarrassed as well as angry. Then call your elected officials and talk about you feel.

More embarrassment as Trump grifts big in front of the world, and America doesn’t stop him.

US accepts luxury jet from Qatar for use as Air Force One for Trump.

• Democrats say it will cost $1 billion or more to convert the plane to Air Force One standards
• Trump said it would be 'stupid' not to accept gift
• Pentagon has not said how much it will cost to retrofit the plane

WASHINGTON, May 21 (Reuters) - The United States has accepted a luxury Boeing 747 jetliner as a gift from Qatar and the Air Force has been asked to find a way to rapidly upgrade it for use as a new Air Force One to transport President Donald Trump, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth accepted the jet for use as Trump's official plane, the Pentagon said.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the Defense Department "will work to ensure proper security measures and functional-mission requirements are considered."

Legal experts have questioned the scope of laws relating to gifts from foreign governments that aim to thwart corruption and improper influence.

Democrats have also sought to block the handover.
"Today marks a dark day in history: the president of the United States of America officially accepted the largest bribe from a foreign government in American history," Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said.

The "unprecedented action is a stain on the office of the presidency and cannot go unanswered," he added.

Qatar has dismissed concerns about the aircraft deal. Trump has also shrugged off ethical concerns, saying it would be "stupid" not to accept the 747-8 jet.

When new, the jet had a $400 million list price, but analysts at Cirium said a second-hand 747-8 might fetch a quarter of that.

Retrofitting the 13-year-old plane, which has a luxurious interior, will require significant security upgrades, communications improvements to prevent spies from listening in and the ability to fend off incoming missiles, experts say.

The plane might need fighter jet escorts and could be restricted to flying inside the U.S. unless costly security upgrades were made, aviation experts and industry sources said previously.
Democratic Senators Mazie Hirono and Tammy Duckworth said on Tuesday it could cost more than $1 billion to retrofit the plane and it raised dramatic security risks.

Duckworth said the United States has two fully operational Air Force One jets and has no need to retrofit the Qatari plane.

"Any civilian aircraft will take significant modifications," Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said at a Senate hearing on Tuesday. "We will make sure we do what's necessary to ensure security of the aircraft."

He said the Air Force had been directed to begin planning to address modifications to the plane.
The Pentagon has not said how much it will cost or how long it will take.

The costs could be significant given the cost for Boeing's (BA.N), opens new tab current effort to build two new Air Force One planes is over $5 billion. The current Air Force One airplanes entered service in 1990.

The Air Force One program has faced chronic delays over the last decade, with the delivery of two new 747-8s slated for 2027, three years behind the previous schedule.

Boeing in 2018 received a $3.9 billion contract to build the two planes for use as Air Force One, though costs have since risen. Boeing has also posted $2.4 billion in charges from the project.(Reuters)

THE MIDEAST IS DONALD TRUMP’S SAFE PLACE.

by Susan Glasser.

On the “free” airplane from Qatar, and an American President with a self-interested foreign policy a sheikh could admire.

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. ♦ (The New Yorker).

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Not all Trump lies go unanswered.

Former Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter refutes Trump's criticism

Deborah Rutter, the former Kennedy Center president who was fired by President Donald Trump in a major shakeup of the institution, is rejecting criticisms of her tenure.

Former Kennedy Center board chair David Rubenstein, top left, and former president Deborah Rutter, top right, pose during the 43rd Annual Kennedy Center Honors on May 21, 2021 with honorees Joan Baez, Garth Brooks, Debbie Allen, Dick Van Dyke, Midori Gotō.

In February, Trump abruptly ousted Rutter, as well as board chair and major donor David Rubenstein and board members appointed by President Joseph Biden. Trump's newly-elected board voted him in as the new chair.

At a dinner with the Kennedy Center board Monday evening, Trump said the previous leadership spent millions of dollars. "I don't know where they spent it," he said. "They certainly didn't spend it on wallpaper, carpet or painting."

Also in the video, current Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell claimed the "deferred maintenance of the Kennedy Center is criminal" and that a review of previous years' budgets "found $26 million in phantom revenue." He said he planned to "refer this to the U.S. attorney's office."

In response to the assertions, Rutter wrote in a statement, "I am deeply troubled by the false allegations regarding the management of the Kennedy Center being made by people without the context or expertise to understand the complexities involved in nonprofit and arts management."

Rutter's statement was emailed to the media Tuesday and is now posted on her website.

She continued, "This malicious attempt to distort the facts, which were consistently, transparently and readily available in professionally audited financial reports, recklessly disregards the truth."

The Kennedy Center is a vast performing arts hub in Washington, D.C., with seven theaters and some 2,000 performances and events per year. On a tour of the center in March, Trump said it was "in tremendous disrepair," and claimed "bad management" was the cause.

While Rutter did not address the president's allegation that the center was in "disrepair" in her statement, she responded to NPR via email, saying, "Due to the limited and decreased funding from the federal government, there is a backlog of maintenance that has been prioritized to mirror the appropriated funding."

She added "This is true of federal buildings and properties in Washington and across the country."

In 2021 the Smithsonian, another institution that receives federal funds, estimated its deferred maintenance backlog at more than $1 billion.

A House committee has approved a proposal for an enormous budget increase for the Kennedy Center. It would allocate more than $250 million to the Center, most of which would go towards repairs. That's a sixfold increase from the roughly $40 million the center has received from Congress each year.

In her statement, Rutter said that in each of her 10 years as president, the Kennedy Center's budget "served as a blueprint for our operations and programming — standard and responsible practice in arts management."

She noted that the budget was approved by Kennedy Center's board, which included appointees from Trump's first term as President. Trump appointed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to the Kennedy Center's board in 2020 and she still serves. At the time she was appointed, she was a member of Trump's legal team.

Rutter continued, "Perhaps those now in charge are facing significant financial gaps and are seeking to attribute them to past management."

Asked about Grenell's claim of finding "$26 million in phantom revenue," Rutter told NPR, "We have no idea what they are referring to."

The Kennedy Center claims previous leadership misled the board. In a statement, the center's current Chief Financial Officer, Donna Arduin, wrote, "The former leadership built a broken budget with an operating deficit of 100 million dollars and a bottom-line deficit of 26 million dollars."

Former board chair David Rubenstein refuted the allegation. "With full transparency, the financial reports were reviewed and approved by the Kennedy Center's audit committee and full board as well as a major accounting firm," he wrote in a statement.

The Kennedy Center in Washington DC laid off its social impact team on Tuesday — the latest in a wave of dramatic changes at the national performing arts institution.

Trump's takeover of the Kennedy Center and the layoffs that followed under Grenell's leadership have angered many artists and led to canceled performances by people like actor Issa Rae and musician Rhiannon Giddens. A production of the Broadway musical Hamilton was also canceled.

This week, the Kennedy Center announced its 2025-2026 season, which includes the touring Broadway productions of The Outsiders and Moulin Rouge, the musical Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock LIVE and performances by the New York City Ballet and the Martha Graham Dance Company.

At Monday night's board dinner, Grenell mentioned the Kennedy Center productions of Les Misérables and Porgy and Bess and urged those in attendance "to go out and buy tickets." (NPR).

Deborah Ritter’s statement.

Trump ambushes South African president with video and false claims of anti-white racism.

Cyril Ramaphosa responds to hectoring stunt in Oval Office and egregious claim of white genocide by suggesting calm.

Trump tried to “zelenskyy” South African President Ramaphosa yesterday in the Oval Office, but the SA President fought back with truth.

Donald Trump ambushed the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, by playing him a video that he falsely claimed proved genocide was being committed against white people under “the opposite of apartheid”.

The hectoring stunt on Wednesday set up the most tense Oval Office encounter since Trump’s bullying of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February. But Ramaphosa – who earlier said that he had come to Washington to “reset” the relationship between the two countries – refused to take the bait and suggested that they “talk about it very calmly”.

Trump has long maintained that Afrikaners, a minority descended from mainly Dutch colonists who ruled South Africa during its decades of racial apartheid, are being persecuted. South Africa rejects the allegation. Murder rates are high in the country and the overwhelming majority of victims are Black.

What began as a convivial meeting at the White House, including lighthearted quips about golf, took a sudden turn when Ramaphosa told Trump there is no genocide against Afrikaners.

Trump said: “We have thousands of stories talking about it,” then ordered his staff: “Turn the lights down and just put this on.”

Sitting next to Trump before the fireplace, Ramaphosa forced a smile and turned to look at a big TV screen as Trump’s South Africa-born billionaire ally Elon Musk, JD Vance, the defence secretary Pete Hegseth and diplomats and journalists from both countries looked on.

The video included footage of former South African president Jacob Zuma and firebrand opposition politician Julius Malema singing an apartheid-era struggle song called “Kill the Boer”, which means farmer or Afrikaner, as supporters danced.

Ramaphosa quietly but firmly pushed back, pointing out that the views expressed in the video are not government policy.

There was also footage that Trump claimed showed the graves of more than a thousand white farmers, marked by white crosses. Ramaphosa, who had mostly sat expressionless, occasionally craning his neck to look, said he had not seen that before and would like to find out what the location was.

Trump then produced a batch of newspaper articles that he said were from the last few days reporting on killings in South Africa. He read some of the headlines and commented: “Death, death, death, horrible death.”

Ramaphosa acknowledged there is crime in South Africa and said the majority of victims are Black. Trump cut him off and said: “The farmers are not Black.”

The conspiracy theory of a white genocide has long been a staple of the racist far right, and in recent years has been amplified by Musk and rightwing media personality Tucker Carlson.

Trump kept returning to the theme during Wednesday’s televised meeting. He said: “Now I will say, apartheid: terrible. That was the biggest threat. That was reported all the time. This is sort of the opposite of apartheid.

“What’s happening now is never reported. Nobody knows about it. All we know is we’re being inundated with people, with white farmers from South Africa, and it’s a big problem.”

He added: “They’re white farmers, and they’re fleeing South Africa, and it’s a very sad thing to see. But I hope we can have an explanation of that, because I know you don’t want that.”

Demonstrators rally in support of Donald Trump outside the US embassy in Pretoria in February after he accused South Africa of persecuting Afrikaners.

But Ramaphosa maintained an even tone, observing: “We were taught by Nelson Mandela that whenever there are problems, people need to sit down around the table and talk about them. And this is precisely what we would also like to talk about.”

The meeting came days after around 50 Afrikaners arrived in the US to take up Trump’s offer of “refuge”. Trump made the offer despite the US having halted arrivals of asylum seekers from most of the rest of the world as he cracks down on immigration.

Relations between the countries are at their lowest point since the end of apartheid in 1994. The US has condemned South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza at the international court of justice, slashed aid, announced 31% tariffs and expelled the South Africa ambassador for criticising Trump’s Make America great again (Maga) movement.

But the biggest bone of contention has been a South African land-expropriation law signed in January that aims to redress the historical inequalities of white minority rule. Ramaphosa denied that the law will be used to arbitrarily confiscate white-owned land, insisting that all South Africans are protected by the constitution.

But Trump falsely asserted: “You do allow them to take land – and then when they take the land, they kill the white farmer, and when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them. …

“You’re taking people’s land away from them and those people in many cases are being executed. They’re being executed and they happen to be white.”

Ramaphosa arrived at the White House with agriculture minister John Steenhuisen, who is white, two of South Africa’s top golfers, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, and the country’s wealthiest person, Johann Rupert, in a bid to woo the golf-loving president. All weighed in during the Oval Office meeting and seemed to be well-received by Trump.

Rupert said South Africa needs technological help in stopping deaths in the country, which he said were not just of white farmers but across the board. “We have too many deaths ... It’s not only white farmers, it’s across the board, and we need technological help. We need Starlink at every little police station. We need drones,” Rupert said.

South Africa will reportedly offer Musk, who was born in the country, a deal to operate his Starlink satellite internet network in the country. The Tesla and SpaceX boss has accused Pretoria of “openly racist” laws, a reference to post-apartheid Black empowerment policies seen as a hurdle to the licensing of Starlink.

South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world. White people make up 7% of the country’s population but own at least half of South Africa’s land. They are also better off economically by almost every measure. (The Guardian).

One more thing.

What white South African looked on during the Oval Office meeting?

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A Sad Reminder of what is happening at CBS.

Write and object. cbsnews@cbsinteractive.com

Just a few years ago — though it seems light years away now — I wrote a column at the Washington Post about the 50th anniversary of CBS’s legendary program, “60 Minutes.”

in 2018, there was every reason to celebrate the long-running show’s quality by remembering many moments of outstanding journalism. Mike Wallace holding Nixon administration officials’ feet to the fire during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. Scott Pelley challenging former CIA Director George Tenet in 2007 about the agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which might be more simply termed torture. Ed Bradley’s 2004 reexamination of the murder of Emmett Till.

Mike Wallace of CBS News and “Sixty Minutes” was famous for his tough questioning of public officials/ Getty Images.

But now, the show — and CBS, once known as the “Tiffany Network” and the home of Walter Cronkite — is in the news for another reason.

And what’s happened tells us a great deal about the state of the nation and its weakened news media.

For months, the internal drama at CBS News has been been a running story. Donald Trump sued the network for defamation — a whopping $20 billion worth — over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris during last year’s presidential campaign. He claims that it was deceitfully edited to benefit her and harm him. (There’s no reason to think that’s true; the editing, by all accounts, was standard stuff.)

But rather than standing firm on its principles and defending its practices, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, has been busy negotiating with Trump’s people. It sounds like they’re getting close to settling the case for tens of millions of dollars — something they absolutely should not be doing.

Why are they doing it? That part is easy. The boss at Paramount, Shari Redstone, wants to clear a path for her big media merger. Apparently she’s willing to sacrifice the network’s journalistic integrity and credibility to do so.

A couple of weeks ago, the well respected Bill Owens stepped down as executive producer at “60 Minutes,” saying he felt his editorial independence had been breached.

This week, another shoe dropped. This one is even more consequential.

Wendy McMahon, president and chief executive of CBS News, abruptly resigned, after essentially being forced out. “It’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward,” she said in a memo to staff. Here’s a gift link to the New York Times coverage.

The turmoil “has turned CBS News into collateral in a merger fight,” wrote Oliver Darcy in his Status media newsletter. Darcy reported that McMahon particularly objected to issuing an apology to Trump as part of the settlement. That was “a red line that she would not cross.”

She’s right. There’s no reason to apologize. And there’s every reason to think that doing so would add to the mess that’s unfolding every day, as major institutions fail to stand their ground. This is one of the biggest disappointments of the current moment, and one of the most dangerous signs about our future.

Some law firms are, in essence, paying protection money to Trump. Universities, like Columbia where I work, are yielding to some of the administration’s demands. Many businesses are backing down from their diversity efforts.

I admire people like Owens and McMahon for fighting hard internally to preserve editorial integrity — and then, when they realized that the battle had been lost, leaving the network rather than compromise their beliefs.

There really are some lines in the sand. And McMahon was right to recognize that an apology to Trump, as part of a huge settlement, was one of them.

Where does that leave the many outstanding journalists at “60 Minutes” and, more broadly, at CBS News?

They’re in a tough spot — the same kind of spot that has caused so many prominent journalists at the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to resign rather than stay someplace where they can’t do their best work or fulfill their missions. Some of those at “60 Minutes” (Scott Pelley is one) may not return for next season — if there is one.

What baffles and infuriates me is how the leadership figures of these major institutions refuse to recognize the harm they are doing, including to the places they are supposed to be stewarding — and to their own reputations. After all, Trump and his minions will never be satisfied with any settlement or negotiation.

Appeasement never works.

The goalposts will always be moved, and then moved again. In fact, Trump is again attacking ABC News (which settled another unnecessary claim from him a few months ago). This time it’s over ABC’s coverage of his appalling, unethical decision to accept the “gift” of a jet from Qatar.

The original title of this newsletter — back when it began as a podcast in 2023 — was going to be, “Can Journalism Save Democracy?” I decided to make the title more punchy, and I came up with American Crisis.

Just as well. (Margaret Sullivan, Substack)

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Victory in Philadelphia.

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