Jet-Fueled Grift, Tariff Surrender, and Budgetary Bloodletting

Trump gets a Qatari palace in the sky, China gets what it wants, and America’s poor get the heat shut off.

Good morning! While millions of Americans brace for blackouts thanks to Trump's proposed elimination of federal heating aid, the former reality-TV-star-turned-president is preparing to accept a luxury Boeing 747-8 jet from the nation of Qatar, a country he once accused of “funding terrorism at a very high level.” Now, they’re funding him. And in true autocrat fashion, he’s calling it diplomacy.

The deal, first reported by ABC News and then rapidly walked back by panicked Qatari officials, is exactly what it looks like: a gleaming $400 million bribe, wrapped in enough red, white, and blue legalese to pass for a “gift to the Department of Defense.” The aircraft would serve as a temporary Air Force One, because the sitting president needs a new ride from a monarchy he once vilified, and later be handed off to Trump’s “presidential library,” which exists so far only in PowerPoint form and gold-plated fantasies. Even more brazenly, the arrangement was greenlit by Trump’s own DOJ under Pam Bondi, the same Bondi now caught on undercover video admitting the FBI is sitting on a massive cache of Epstein evidence. That’s right: the woman waving off sex trafficking coverups at brunch is also signing off on foreign aircraft “gifts” to the president.

Naturally, Trump took to Truth Social to froth at the mouth about the “FREE OF CHARGE” nature of the jet, blaming “Crooked Democrats” for daring to suggest that the Constitution might have something to say about accepting a private airliner from a foreign power. “World Class Losers!!!” he shouted into the void, before pivoting to a post about drug prices, the Middle East, or possibly shark attacks, it’s hard to keep up.

Meanwhile, the U.S. press, accustomed now to treating Trump corruption as a weather pattern, shrugged. USA Today tucked the story under a business-style lede. The Hill treated it like a procedural oddity. Even Politico, which broke early coverage, defaulted to the word “gift” as if this were a silver platter from Tiffany’s, not a geopolitical IOU from a wealthy Gulf state that houses the largest U.S. military base in the region.

Compare that with non-U.S. media, where the coverage is far less deferential. Al Jazeera, based in Doha, ran a headline emphasizing the potential for diplomatic fallout. European outlets, from Le Monde to Der Spiegel, framed it as the kind of transactional sleaze normally reserved for tinpot despots and FIFA officials. British headlines effectively asked: “Is the U.S. presidency now available for charter?”

Back in Washington, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered the usual Word Salad of Compliance™, assuring reporters that “any gift given by a foreign government is accepted in full compliance with applicable laws”, which is a bit like saying “the check cleared” when asked if you paid your taxes.

Congress, to its credit, has at least pretended to notice. Rep. Jamie Raskin called the jet “a grift,” reminding the nation that the Constitution prohibits gifts “of any kind whatsoever” from foreign states without congressional consent. Sen. Chris Murphy took it a step further, pointing out that the mere fact this deal is “under consideration” tells other countries exactly how to curry favor with MAGA America: buy the man a flying palace.

It’s not just the corruption, it’s the pageantry of it. A Trump-branded aircraft from an oil-rich monarchy, timed just before a goodwill tour of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. You could almost hear the plane whispering “Emoluments, baby” as it taxi’d into the narrative.

And just like that, American global leadership morphs into something more familiar to the developing world: governance via gift basket, loyalty for sale, and luxury in exchange for silence.

If the Qatari jet didn’t make it clear enough, the new Trump Doctrine is simple: power is performance, and governance is a series of flashy, empty gestures designed to distract from the kleptocratic dismantling happening just behind the curtain.

Over the weekend in Geneva, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent did his best impression of a man who hadn’t just been publicly pantsed by the world’s second-largest economy. After Chinese officials reportedly walked out of the talks on Saturday, a dramatic gesture of diplomatic side-eye, the negotiations quietly resumed, and by Sunday, both sides were all smiles and euphemisms. The U.S. agreed to slash tariffs on Chinese goods from 145% to 30%, a stunning reversal for an administration that once claimed tariffs were the secret sauce of American greatness. China, in turn, graciously agreed to lower its tariffs from 125% to 10%, and everyone called it “progress.”

This so-called “90-day pause” is meant to buy time for more negotiations, or as Bessent put it, to implement a shiny new “economic and trade consultation mechanism”, which is exactly the sort of bureaucratic mumbo jumbo you deploy when you have no actual deal, but still need to announce something before the markets open. They also claim to be addressing fentanyl trafficking, because no Trump-era press release is complete without one vague nod to the opioid crisis as moral cover for a bad trade concession.

Markets, ever the optimists, soared on the news because nothing says “stability” like your top trade partner storming out of a summit, then returning to extract unilateral concessions and a press conference. But critics, economists, and anyone with a memory longer than a goldfish noted the obvious: no enforcement, no structural reforms, no wins. Just a hasty de-escalation disguised as diplomacy and a pile of talking points, Trump will surely forget by Thursday.

In short: Beijing got what it wanted, Trump got a headline, and America got the Geneva Mechanism™, a fancy name for letting someone else write your homework and still calling it leadership.

And where does all this “savings” from the tariff rollback go? Not to the poor. Not to working families. Not to anyone trying to heat their home or get their insulin filled.

Which brings us home to the brutal elegance of Trump's domestic budget.

No sooner had the ink dried on Bessent’s “deal” with China than the Trump White House dropped its new budget proposal, featuring a now-familiar pattern: tax cuts for the rich, austerity for everyone else. Among the first targets: Medicaid and LIHEAP, the last remaining federal lifelines for health and heat in low-income America.

The Medicaid portion of Trump’s tax bill, unveiled late Sunday by House Republicans, includes new work requirements and eligibility hurdles, designed to bump people off coverage without technically cutting them. No per-capita caps (yet), but make no mistake, this is a bureaucratic war of attrition, waged against the poor in the name of “savings.” The Energy and Commerce Committee has been instructed to find $880 billion in Medicaid cuts to help fund Trump’s proposed extension of his 2017 tax cuts.

Not to be outdone, the administration also proposed eliminating LIHEAP, calling the program “unnecessary.” Never mind that it provided heating assistance to over 6 million households last year, or that it’s often the difference between freezing and surviving for elderly and disabled Americans. Trump’s team already fired the entire LIHEAP staff, rehired one person temporarily under pressure from Senator Susan Collins just to disburse the remainder of this year’s funds, and then proposed zeroing it out permanently. All while citing a debunked 2010 fraud report as justification.

So here’s the emerging picture: luxury jets for Trump, tariff relief for China, tax breaks for billionaires, and icy silence for anyone who can’t afford to keep the lights on. It’s a worldview rooted in spectacle, enforced by cruelty, and sold with all the subtlety of a campaign ad shouted through a bullhorn at a foreclosure auction.

And still, the media pretends it's normal.

And because no Trumpian tableau is complete without a bit of snake oil, Monday morning brought us a dramatic Truth Social proclamation from the president himself: a new executive order, he declared, would soon slash drug prices by “30% to 80%” through a “most favored nation” policy that would peg U.S. prices to those in other wealthy countries.

He hyped it as “one of the most important and impactful [truths] I have ever issued,” which, coming from the man who once live-blogged a hurricane path with a Sharpie, is at least consistent in tone if not in substance.

The irony, of course, is staggering. This exact same policy, literally the same framework, was part of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump killed in January as one of his first acts upon returning to office. The Biden plan, scheduled to go into effect in 2026, would have empowered Medicare to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies on drug prices. It was real, legislated, and enforceable.

But that was too “socialist” for Trump and his pharma donor base. So he axed it.

Now, under pressure to look like he’s doing something for everyday Americans, he’s reintroducing Biden’s policy as his own, wrapped in self-aggrandizing buzzwords and with no clear mechanism or legislative teeth. It’s not a policy, it’s a branding exercise. Worse, it’s one that the pharmaceutical industry already torpedoed during Trump’s first attempt to implement it in 2020. Back then, the courts tossed it. This time, they’re already sharpening their knives.

Naturally, Trump offered no details, just that prices will fall “immediately,” and that Americans will finally “be treated fairly.” His version will apply to a broader set of drugs than the original Biden policy, yet it lacks any oversight, legal structure, or clear enforcement mechanism. It’s a soundbite, not a strategy.

Pharma lobbyists responded on cue. “Government price setting in any form is bad for American patients,” said Alex Schriver of PhRMA, because, of course, they did. These are the same voices who hiked prices on over 250 drugs just this January, including life-saving medications that cost a fraction in Europe or Canada.

And so the Trump administration now stands for eliminating federal health coverage, canceling heating aid, and then proposing to lower drug prices through a recycled executive order he previously dismantled. It's like lighting your house on fire, throwing a bucket of lukewarm water on it, and demanding a Nobel Prize in firefighting.

Meanwhile, 67 million Americans on Medicare wait, watching their out-of-pocket costs soar as Big Pharma roars ahead with quarterly profits, and Trump jets off to the Middle East, possibly aboard that gifted Qatari plane, to celebrate the art of the deal with people who don’t need coupons for insulin.