A reported engine malfunction forced Donald Trump's private plane to make an emergency landing last Saturday, and that it barely made a dent in the current gawdawful news cycle can probably be taken as evidence of just how gawdawful each day's "real" news continues to be. Losing one engine on a four three-engine passenger jet poses little actual danger, other than to some Republican’s wallet, and "had to return to New Orleans" barely rates compared to the news it's competing with—news of bombed-out maternity centers and analyses of whether Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin is now so humiliated with his army's performance that he will turn to chemical or nuclear weapons to "conquer" what his grift-o-matic military commanders could not.
It should be noted from the outset that this was not Trump's own personal plane. The plane in question is said to be a Dassault Falcon 900 loaned to him by an unnamed donor, and the Republican National Committee hurriedly found him another donor plane to fly home on because the Republican Party pays for everything Trump does now. He's not going to fly his own plane, because that's expensive and he doesn't have that kind of cash. He's going to make Republican donors pay to fly him around for the rest of his life, and their reward will be getting to listen to Trump rant about windmills or toilets for 90 minutes straight.
Got it, had to turn a plane around. Terrible tragedy. If only we could find a Ukrainian farmer willing to tow the thing to wherever it needed to go.
That is not, however, the end of the story. How could it be? The very same hour the story of Trump's engine failure made the news, Donald Trump's PAC launched a new fundraising drive announcing that he's secretly building a new plane, one with blackjack, and—I mean, a "BRAND NEW Trump Force One," according to the fundraising email. Per Newsweek:
"This embed redirects to a donation page where recipients can donate between $5 and $2,000 to the Save America JFC PAC. However, that page does not have a photograph of the so-called Trump Force One that was teased in the initial email."
I'm going to pretend I don't know what the JFC in the Save America JFC PAC stands for, because what I choose to believe it stands for is much, much funnier. Also, the email emphasizes that the media doesn't know about this news, he's only sharing it with you, Bob LastNameNotFound, and he'll "need to trust that you won't share it with anyone." The usual cult behaviors are at work here, with a weird Dear Leader figure telling his acolytes that they're special because they know super-secret truths but that they absolutely not share this knowledge with anyone else because outsiders might, well, mock them incessantly for falling for this crap.
Anyhoo, at first glance it might look like Donald Trump is fundraising off his supporters so that he can buy himself a new grotesquely large private plane with four working engines, but the truth is ... well, we don't know. The email teases Trump supporters with news of a plane that may not exist, but tells them to donate their cash to Trump's JFC PAC.
You would think that this definitely means the money he's raising here will be going to his political campaign, not replacing his own private jet with a newer one but, as we've seen, large chunks of the money from Donald Trump's political "campaigns" seems to end up in Donald Trump's New York tower, his for-profit Florida home-slash-club, or his Washington hotel. One can easily imagine a scenario in which Trump says that since he mentioned buying a new plane in a campaign email, naturally his campaign needs to pay him back for that publicity by ponying up some of the plane's purchase costs.
The man only entered politics as a grift, and he's certainly not going to let go of the grift now. And he's also probably fuming over having to change planes in New Orleans, something that only the peasant class is expected to do.
Now that we've gotten all of that out of the way, however, it's speculation time. How is it that Donald Trump's donated plane found itself suddenly one engine short during a hop from a New Orleans fundraiser back to Trump's Palm Beach home? Who was this donor who "loaned" Donald Trump a jet with a serious mechanical oopsie?
Donald, please don't tell me the donor was a jet-owning Russian oligarch. We've been seeing video after video showing how the Russian kleptocracy maintains even its military equipment; after the last two weeks, I don't think anyone in the world is going to be eager to get on a Russian-maintained jet anytime soon.
Another possibility, and one that's completely implausible and nonsensical but still a possibility, is that some Republican donor just tried to dump Republican Dear Leader figure Donald Trump into the Gulf of Mexico by loaning him a faulty jet. This theory is absurd. It's based on absolutely nothing. And it's going to eat at Donald Trump's brain, you know it will, because in Donald Trump's mind the only things that happen anywhere in the world are things intended to help Donald Trump and things intended to hurt Donald Trump. There is no coincidence. Donald Trump will never, ever be truly convinced that these things just happen, or that a private jet might have had an engine failure even if he was not on board. Some unnamed donor is now on his permanent enemies list, and he's probably screaming at his Secret Service agents right now to demand they arrest and torture the plane's owner until he confesses to the crime.
There's a reason, of course, that Donald is demanding rides on other people's private jets to begin with. During the four years of Trump's—ahem—unfortunate tenure, Trump's ride was a government-issued, government-maintained plane that was obliged to take him everywhere he wanted to go. His own personal 757 was left idle in New York with one missing engine, and the other wrapped in plastic. It was flown exactly zero times during Trump's time in office, and the costs to get it running again were said to be enormous. (Perhaps most curiously, it was left to decay in snowy New York rather than being temporarily mothballed in a less damaging, drier climate.)
Facing a "high six-figure" repair bill, Donald Trump is instead insisting that he'll build a new plane, one with actual working engines, rather than devoting his wallet towards repairing the old one. But Donald Trump lies about everything all the time, and it's quite likely that he's lying about this, too. It's possible he really does intend to "construct" a new plane. But it's far more likely that Trump is going to use a "my new plane isn't ready yet" excuse to get the Republican Party and its many donors to give him free rides on other people's top-class jets rather than spring for a new one himself.
We don't know what Trump's true net worth might be, but we know it's a lot less than he says it is. And if even half of the investigations aimed at his companies find what everyone expects they'll find, he's going to have a lot less than that by the time he runs for "president" again.
Related: Trump administration gave private jet companies over half a billion in pandemic bailout funds
