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How does anyone beat a $400mn flying palace? Donald Trump’s apparent willingness to accept a Qatari luxury jet to replace Air Force One — though whether the deal will go ahead remains murky — has rightly drawn ire not just from ethics watchdogs but even Maga loyalists usually reluctant to criticise the US president.
Still, the grand gift is as old as diplomacy itself. Long before photo opportunities and press conferences, heads of state and dignitaries exchanged jewels or silks and handed over brides as instruments of diplomacy. Byzantine emperors sent fragments of the True Cross to fellow Christian rulers in Europe; Kings Louis XV and XVI of France gave Sèvres porcelain. Ottoman sultans opted for robes of honour.
Gifts flatter, amuse, but most importantly, bind. They are expressions of esteem, acts of penance, or simply blatant attempts to curry favour. US presidents are no strangers to such acts. Richard Nixon received two giant pandas from China, whose “panda diplomacy” dates back centuries. Queen Victoria’s 1880 gift of the Resolute Desk, crafted from the salvaged HMS Resolute, is still where Trump signs his fusillade of executive orders. The Statue of Liberty was given to the people of America by France in 1884.
America’s founders tried to rein in grift with the emoluments clause of the Constitution, barring federal officeholders from receiving gifts or payments from “any King, Prince, or foreign State”. These days, federal rules require any foreign gift valued at over $480 to be declared and turned over for archiving. Trump said the Qatari Boeing would be passed, once he left office, to his presidential library, though these do not usually come with runways.
If a president wants to keep a particularly shiny trinket, they must formally declare it and pay tax on it. But a Congressional inquiry found that in Trump’s first term, more than 100 foreign gifts given to the president and his family — including golf clubs from Japan, daggers and swords from Saudi Arabia and jewellery from India — together worth tens of thousands of dollars, had not been declared.
Gifts of exotic animals, gold coins, glitzy watches or furs may not radically shift policy, but the photo opp alone can repay the gesture. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin cuddling a puppy given to him by Turkmenistan’s dictator Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov — who dangled the creature by the scruff of its neck in front of assembled statesmen and media — did more than any communiqué could. In some cultures, particularly across Asia and the Middle East, not giving something significant can itself be seen as an insult. While western countries draw up bribery rules and transparency disclosures, elsewhere restraint can be read as disrespect or lack of generosity.
Still things don’t always go to plan. Mali’s 2013 gift of a baby camel to French President François Hollande was left in the care of a Malian family only to end up in a traditional tagine, according to a book by UK diplomat Paul Brummell. In a bid to woo the Maharaja of Patiala, and increase the chances of India remaining neutral in the run-up to second world war, Adolf Hitler sent him a Maybach DS8 Zeppelin car. The Maharaja kept the car and supported Britain anyway.
If Qatar’s offer of a Boeing is genuine, gift inflation surely looms: what follows a jet? A superyacht? A small island? Trump suggests only a “stupid person” would say no to a plane, whatever the ethical niceties. As the US president pulls the world back to a form of great power diplomacy, where foreign policy is brokered between strongmen leaders behind closed doors, the perennial practice of the extravagant gift — updated for the billionaire age — seems set to enjoy an unwelcome resurgence too.
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