The hosts of the Fox News show The Five have joined a growing chorus of President Donald Trump’s own supporters who say that accepting a free luxury jet from Qatar would be a bad idea.
The president is in talks to receive a $400 million Boeing 747-8 from the Qatari royal family to use as Air Force One for the remainder of his term, after which the plane would be transferred to the Trump library foundation.
Trump has said it would be “stupid” to turn down the gift, but not everyone in MAGA is convinced.
“I don’t think the plane is that great of an idea to accept, because I think if we are forcing Democrats and the Biden family—which was famous for decades of grift—if we’re holding them to account, then I think it’s a political mistake to be doing something that could be construed as the same thing,” host Kennedy said during Wednesday’s episode.
“You’ve got to act better than your predecessor,” co-host Greg Gutfeld agreed.
“Yeah, and you have to be able to employ the political golden rule, which is, if it’s wrong for them, it’s wrong for us,” Kennedy responded. “And why distract from the phenomenal wins that have happened over the last 10 days?”
The president is in the Middle East this week promoting a number of business deals with no clear foreign policy goals, according to The New York Times.
The network’s Fox and Friends hosts had previously tried to defend the gift by arguing that after the Yalta Conference in 1945, former President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave Saudi Arabia “three airliners… to kickstart Saudi airlines.”
It was actually one plane, according to the airline. King Abdul Aziz bought the other two.
And although Roosevelt and Aziz seem to have genuinely hit it off, the president had some very specific goals when he offered up the Douglas DC-3 passenger plane. He was trying to convince Saudi Arabia to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine and secure U.S. access to Saudi oil, according to the History Channel.
In any case, MAGA influencers have argued that accepting such a lavish gift from Qatar isn’t putting “America first” given the emirate’s ties to Hamas and other terrorist groups.
Republican senators, meanwhile, have expressed concerns about the legal and ethical considerations—not to mention the security risks involved in accepting a plane to use as Air Force One from a foreign government.
“I’m not flying on a Qatari plane. They support Hamas,” Florida Sen. Rick Scott, one of Trump’s staunchest supporters in the Senate, told The Hill. “I don’t know how you make it safe.”
The post Even Fox News Hosts Want Trump to Ditch His Qatar Plane Scheme appeared first on The Daily Beast.
