The Mideast Is Donald Trump’s Safe Place

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.

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