This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. The president’s inclination to view nearly everything as a potential real-estate deal inspired his bizarre suggestion to clear the strip and turn it into a luxury beachfront development, the “Riviera of the Middle East.” And his poorly concealed fixation on winning the Nobel Peace Prize seems to animate many of his choices in the region. Back in May, I wrote about Trump’s plans to accept a white-elephant 747 from Qatar: “If there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there’s certainly no such thing as a free plane.” I was thinking primarily about what Qatar might expect in return, but in The New York Times, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt report on the more immediate costs of refitting the plane for its new role as Air Force One.
Author: David A. Graham
Published at: 2025-07-28 22:45:00
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