President Donald Trump will fly to Ireland next week aboard the Boeing 747 he received as a gift from Qatar, a senior White House official said — his first international flight on the jet since a security scare over Turkey in July forced him to leave the country on a decoy plane instead.
The Washington Post reported that the Ireland trip demonstrates Trump's "continued fondness" for the gift luxury jet even though it lacks many of the security and communications features built into the specially armored 747-200B jets that have served as Air Force One for decades.
Trump said in July that the plane would be pulled from service and "maxed out" with upgrades, but the White House still hasn't set a timeline for that work – and it may not happen until after the midterms. A senior administration official declined to discuss specifics, saying only that the government "routinely evolve[s]" its security posture for presidential travel.
With no upgrades underway, Trump is expected to lean on the jet more as his travel schedule picks up ahead of November.
He's set to headline a Republican gathering in Dallas next week and has said he'll visit Alaska and other battleground states before Election Day.
The Ireland jaunt includes meetings in Dublin with President Catherine Connolly and Prime Minister Micheál Martin, plus a stop at Trump's Doonbeg golf resort for the Irish Open, according to the BBC.
The government has already put roughly $400 million into retrofitting the Qatari plane, with no public estimate yet for what further security work will cost. A former press secretary had said modifications would start this fall and wrap in about a month, though outside security experts doubted that timeline was realistic.
The Government Accountability Office pegs the cost of upgrading the two Boeing-built 747s originally ordered by the Air Force in 2017 at more than $5.6 billion — those planes may not be ready before Trump leaves office in 2029 — and lawmakers have pressed officials on why that price tag dwarfs the cost of retrofitting the Qatari jet.
Security questions about the gifted plane first surfaced in July, during Trump's initial international trip on it, to a NATO summit in Turkey. After U.S. intelligence flagged a possible Iranian threat, Trump, his personal aide Natalie Harp and select others were quietly moved off the aircraft and onto a military C-32A via a catering truck, while the Qatari jet flew on as a decoy with Cabinet officials, staff and reporters aboard — most of them unaware of the switch.
Trump initially claimed, inaccurately, that he'd swapped planes simply for "old time's sake." White House communications director Steven Cheung has defended the Qatari jet as "state-of-the-art" with "high-level security protocols."