Flying to Delusion:

Notes on the Gilded Aeronautics of American Decline

One could be forgiven, on first viewing, for mistaking this aircraft for the fever dream of a Gulf potentate with a Liberace fetish and no taste for subtlety. The so-called “gift” from the royal family of Qatar—ostensibly a Boeing 747-8, but more accurately a $400 million airborne Versailles for a man who confuses grandeur with greatness—is less a plane than a monument to the aesthetic bankruptcy of late-stage American spectacle.

That it is destined, in some grotesque ballet of legal acrobatics and geopolitical ego-stroking, to serve first as Air Force One and then as the permanent property of the Trump Presidential Library is a joke so on-the-nose one can almost hear Jonathan Swift sighing in admiration. Here is the ceremonial barge not of a president, but of an emperor in exile, trussed in gold-leaf delusion and flying high above constitutional norms.

What passes for décor inside, we can only imagine, is a compendium of every bad idea ever smuggled into a Gulfstream by a failed interior decorator with a Rolex and a low boiling point. Plush velvets, gold trim, chandelier fittings (God help us), and the inevitable faux-Roman columns—because nothing says “statesman” like replicating Nero’s vestibule at 30,000 feet.

And the plan! Oh, the plan: to retrofit this airborne ego capsule at taxpayer expense—rendering it secure, militarily compliant, and presumably resistant to the gravitational pull of common decency—only to transfer it to a foundation named for the man who will have flown it, lectured from it, and almost certainly branded it “TRUMP ONE” in 12-foot lettering.

It is not an aircraft; it is a symptom. A symptom of the rot at the core of the republic’s civic architecture, now wearing its empire on its sleeve like a parody of Byzantium-by-the-Beltway. It is a talisman of vulgarity, of performative nationalism swaddled in foreign cash, and of a politics where legality is a matter not of principle but of plausibility.

As a critic of art and power, one must say it plainly: this plane is not an object of beauty or utility. It is an avatar of decline, a ludicrous gilded sarcophagus soaring toward history’s dustbin, trailing a plume of exhaust and irony.