By Katherine Tinsley
12:56am PDT, May 16, 2025
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"[Donald Trump is] saying that Qataris came to him and said, 'If we can help you, let us.' I mean, that's exactly what people are afraid of because it means, what are [they] getting in return?" White House Correspondent Kristen Holmes said on CNN's Inside Politics on Wednesday, May 14.
"What are they going to get in return, which he seems to fundamentally not either want to answer or not really understand," she continued. "The level that people are concerned about this as a national security threat when he continues to just say, 'Well, it's a free gift.'"
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MAGA influencer Laura Loomer was "disappointed" in Donald Trump for accepting the plane, and Republican
Rand Paul urged the president not to accept the jumbo jet.
"You can hear these Republicans say over and over again, 'There's no such thing as a free gift,'" Kristen Holmes said. "I mean, that's been the Republican argument as well."
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National security has been a concern throughout Donald Trump's second term.
CNN's Manu Raju chimed in to say he talked to Republican John Thune "about national security concerns" the previous day: "He said, 'Well, we're going to have to vet this,' and he called it a 'hypothetical situation,'" Raju recalled. "And then I asked Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, about it yesterday. He said, 'Well, Trump, of course, shares the same national security concerns that we do, and he'll make sure this is a secure exchange.'"
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Hans Nichols noted that the aircraft will probably be heavily inspected for recording devices.
"Well, look, stripping down the plane and making sure there are any hidden microphones on there, I, as someone who's never retrofitted a 747, that doesn't seem like the biggest challenge here," he said.
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"To me, the bigger question is, will [John] Thune and [Mike] Johnson follow through and do real oversight?" Hans Nichols asked the panelists. "Ted Cruz, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, does he look into this?"
"I'm guessing no," Nia-Malika Henderson replied.
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While Republicans have publicly commented on Donald Trump using the plane, Hans Nichols predicted the party won't take significant action against the president.
"I think we sort of know, but that's really where, if this story advances beyond sort of liberal outrage and some sort of Republican concerns, that's really what will happen," Nichols stated. "It'll happen where you and I spend most of our days in Congress."
"And I'm not convinced that we're going to have big hearings looking into this," he noted. "As long as Republicans, here's my caveat, as long as Republicans are in charge, that's my parachute."
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Nia-Malika Henderson noted that Donald Trump potentially using the plane as Air Force One weakens the United States' image.
"It also sort of makes Donald Trump look like the beta, right? And the country," Henderson said. "We're going across the world because we're too poor to get a plane from somebody else."
"I mean, this is Trump, who's like, 'We're a superpower,' and yet we're taking handouts from Qatar and authoritarian nations," she continued.
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Nia-Malika Henderson continued to point out the bad options of using a gifted Qatari plane as Air Force One: "The optics of it is really, I think, contradicting what [Donald] Trump's sort of idea of America is and himself as, like, the great salesman in bringing America back to greatness," she said.
"Well, if our greatness is relying on another country's largesse, it seems to be a contradiction," she noted.
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Hans Nichols reminded the panelists that Donald Trump stands by his decision.
"He's just gonna say he's getting a good deal, right? He's already said that, right?" Nichols reminded the group.
"I think he'd say the opposite: That he's getting the deal because he's the alpha," Kristen Holmes replied.
