More than just a plane: Gift to Trump highlights Qatar’s multi-billion US influence campaign

The news this week that US President Donald Trump plans to accept a 747 airplane as a gift from the Qatari ruling family has drawn renewed attention to the Gulf state’s decades-long influence campaign in the United States, which has seen the emirate spend billions on a US military base, satellite universities, and lobbying and PR efforts in Washington.

The largest foreign funder of American universities, Qatar has contributed more than $6 billion to US schools over the last 15 years, according to a Thursday report in The Wall Street Journal.

Much of that was in satellite campuses for Georgetown, Cornell, and Northwestern, among others, that are hosted in the emirate’s capital city of Doha — where Qatar has also long hosted the Hamas terror group’s senior political leadership.

The Gulf state’s investment in American higher education has been under greater scrutiny since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack sparked the ongoing war in Gaza.

Demonstrations over the war have upturned American college campuses, prompting arrests, deportation efforts and fights over free speech, amid anti-Israel activists’ expressions of support for Hamas and other terror groups that participated in the onslaught.

US Education Secretary Linda McMahon singled out Qatar last month, following an executive order by Trump for more oversight of foreign funding to universities.

The Qatari government also funds the Al Jazeera news network, including English outlet AJ+, which is currently involved in a US legal battle over whether it must register as a foreign agent. Israel last year banned Al Jazeera and has presented evidence that some employees of the network served as operatives in Hamas.

Ties to Trump’s cabinet

But Trump has heaped praise on Qatar and its leaders since arriving on Wednesday, and has received a lavish welcome. He was not the first one to be wowed by a Qatari charm offensive.

A lengthy article Wednesday in The Free Press calculated that since 2017, when Trump took office for the first time, Qatar has spent $225 million on lobbying and public relations work in Washington.

Among the beneficiaries of Qatar’s investments is US Attorney General Pam Bondi, who represented Qatar as a lobbyist, with her firm charging the emirate $115,000 a month until 2020, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was at the helm of another lobbying firm that represented Qatar’s embassy. FBI Director Kash Patel also worked as a consultant for the country, the report said.

In 2018, the Journal reported that Qatar, which was at that time employing 23 lobbying firms in the US, worked with a list of 250 “Trump influencers,” including prominent Jewish lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and sent some 24 of them to Doha, including now-US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

That report noted that Qatari officials also arranged a meeting at the time with Steve Witkoff, a businessman and long-time golf buddy of Trump’s who had no involvement in politics at the time. Witkoff is now Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and he praised Qatar’s role in facilitating hostage-ceasefire negotiations with Hamas.

In 2023, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought New York’s Park Lane Hotel from Witkoff’s real estate group for $623 million.

Trump’s own family is also involved in major real estate deals with Qatar. The president’s son Eric Trump reached a deal with a Qatari state-owned company on behalf of the Trump Organization just weeks ago to build a 790,000-square-meter golf club there.

Meanwhile, Israel has been racked by its own “Qatargate” scandal, in which close advisers to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are accused of doing illicit PR work for the Gulf state.

Qatar to spend $10b on crucial US air base, Trump says

The Gulf state’s influencing efforts accompany its investment in security partnerships with the US, including hosting the Al Udeid Air Base, the largest US military facility in the Middle East.

According to the US State Department, since 2003, Qatar has contributed $8 billion in developing the facility, which for decades has been a launching point for US attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Witkoff, in an interview with Tucker Carlson in March, said the Qataris “pay for every dollar” of the base, stressing: “There is nothing that the United States has to fund with regard to that airbase. That’s pretty unusual.”

The Qataris “fund everything. They don’t ask for much,” Witkoff said, and related a conversation he had with Michael Erik Kurilla, the general at the helm of US Central Command. “I said to him, what do you think of the Qataris? He says they’re special people. So the people in the know understand that they’re good, decent people,” Witkoff recalled.

Trump, speaking to US troops at the base on Thursday, said that Qatar will invest $10 billion in Al Udeid in the coming years.

On Thursday, it was also announced that Qatar had purchased a “record” 160 commercial airplanes from Boeing.

The deal was separate from Trump’s plan to accept a personal 747 from Qatar’s ruling family as a gift, a plan that has sparked controversy back home and accusations of violating the US Constitution.

Qatar’s prime minister on Thursday dismissed allegations he was using the gift as a way of influencing Trump, saying his country was just trying to help solve the US’s problems.

“Qatar has been always a reliable partner for the US, has been always stepping up to help and support the US, because we believe that this friendship needs to be mutually beneficial for both countries, cannot be a one-way relationship,” said Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani.

Under questioning from reporters on Monday, Trump himself angrily defended the arrangement with Qatar, saying he would be “stupid” not to accept such a gift.