Big Old Grift Airliner

Trump’s Flying Emoluments Clause Violation Should Never Have Left The Ground and He Doesn’t Want You Talking About It.

I use Ground News every single day because I got tired of realizing the same story could look completely different depending on who was telling it and what agenda they were pushing.

Ground News lets me compare coverage side by side, spot media bias, and find the stories other outlets quietly ignore. It’s become one of my favorite research tools because I’d rather see the whole picture than the algorithm-approved version of it.

If you want the receipts instead of the spin, you can get 40% off the Vantage plan I use right here.

👉 https://groundnews.com/jojo

---

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m just a quaint little relic from Ye Olden Times of Common Sense. But if half the planet’s cartoon villains — plus a surprising number of the “good guys” who definitely own at least one commemorative sword — were actively manifesting my head on a pike vision board, I feel like I would not be buckling myself into a flying golden bribe shaped like a Fabergé egg with jet engines.

Call me crazy, call me nostalgic, call me the ghost of responsibility future — but if you’re going to ride around in a diamond-encrusted airborne payoff, it better, bare minimum, be capable of doing the one thing it exists to do: not explode with me in it.

Now, I’m not an aviation expert. I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, a national‑security anything. I don’t know the first goddamn thing about how you keep a missile from turning your aircraft into a limited‑edition commemorative fireball once it’s been launched with your name lovingly Sharpied on the side like your mom labeling your lunchbox. But doesn’t this seem like a pretty bad fucking idea?

And believe me, on the list of things I give even a moderate fuck about — the migratory habits of the lesser African swallow, the true spiritual meaning of YOLO as interpreted by a stoned Gen Z oracle, and the answer to the age-old question of what the hell is actually in a McRib (does anyone know, does anyone dare to ask) — whether Donald Trump personally is vulnerable to an Iranian missile attack inside his four‑hundred‑million‑dollar sky‑bribe does not even nibble at the ass end of the list.

Hell, it’s not even on the backup list, the one scribbled on a bar napkin between “learn how to make kombucha” and “things to do on the Oklahoma Panhandle.”

But here’s what I do care about.

He wasn’t on that plane alone.

The pilots were on that plane. The flight crew. The Secret Service agents whose literal job description is “absorb the bullet and please don’t complain about it.” The staffers who definitely did not sign up for this level of airborne Russian‑roulette cosplay. And the very journalists he came home and threatened for telling the truth about it — they were also hurtling through the sky in an aircraft that wasn’t fit to carry any of them.

And I care — I care a lot, actually, I care in a way that keeps me up at night doing long division on the end of the republic — that his inner circle is so bottomlessly, biblically pathetic that they knew better. They knew it wasn’t ready. They knew this thing had the structural integrity of a LaCroix can that’s already been stepped on. And they put him on it anyway.

Because if these people can’t say no to him about this — about strapping the sitting President into a flying tin can with the missile defenses of a piñata and yeeting him toward an active fucking conflict — then what can they say no to him about?

What’s the line?

Is there a line?

Or are we just raw‑dogging fate now, like, fuck it, Betty White is gone, what is there to live for at this point anyway… and don’t say the purple Doritos, they’re good, but they’re not like, Betty White good, not that I’d ever eat her, and not that I wouldn’t, because I’m sure she’d be delightful… and this has taken a decidedly dark turn no one was asking for, anticipated, or could have ever articulated wanting… but I digress…

Because this is the Reflecting Pool all over again.

He turned our nation’s most iconic man‑made water feature into a kale‑and‑resentment smoothie somebody forgot in a sun‑baked sedan outside the last shuttered gynecologist’s office in a love‑bug‑infested Louisiana swamp parish.

And when people noticed — when the whole country pointed at the very obvious disaster right there in broad daylight — he didn’t take responsibility.

He didn’t say “yeah, that was me.”

No. Anyone who pointed out that the water now looked like the color palette of a depression nap was instantly branded an enemy of national morale.

And the peeling paint?

He conjured a whole squad of imaginary vandals out of thin air — phantoms, tricksters, whatever — when HE was the one who wrecked it.

Driving literal tons of armored vehicle over the edge.

Pouring a metric fuck‑ton of hydrogen peroxide into the pool like he was trying to bleach the soul out of it.

Every decision a disaster, every disaster someone else’s fault.

Because someone always has to be the bad guy.

Someone has to wear the blame, carry the bucket, take the fall.

But it’s never him.

It’s NEVER going to be him.

The buck doesn’t stop with him; the buck takes one look at him and breaks into a dead sprint.

It’s the same script every single time.

He ruins something.

Reality taps him on the shoulder.

Reality gets slapped with a restraining order.

As an aside?

He didn’t need this fucking plane.

We didn’t need this fucking plane.

The one he’s been joyriding around in is already equipped to handle every kind of nightmare the country he’s been bombing the absolute shit out of might want to lob back with a personal “FU” gift‑wrapped to the fuselage.

Oh, and by the way, in 2018 — two thousand eighteen, eight fucking years ago — the United States bought two Boeing 747s to become the next real Air Force One.

They’re still not finished.

And not because the Air Force has spent eight years agonizing over accent pillows or debating which throw blanket “really says democracy.”

It’s because transforming a jumbo jet into the airborne command center of the United States is not a fucking oil change.

You don’t bolt an antenna to the roof, shove a leather recliner where Coach used to be, and call it Air Force One.

These planes have to become flying White Houses.

Flying Situation Rooms.

Machines that can survive the unthinkable—

• hardened communications

• medical facilities

• anti‑missile lasers

• countermeasures that whisper sweet nothings to incoming munitions and escort them politely elsewhere

Because if civilization has the worst Tuesday in human history while the President is over the Atlantic, that airplane is the United States government.

That takes years.

It has taken eight.

The real planes are maybe two years out.

Two years.

He could not wait two years.

But here’s the thing:

It’s not even about him waiting two years.

He doesn’t HAVE two years.

His presidency will be over—if he even survives long enough for the curtain call.

It’s just that he wants his fucking cookie now.

He sees a cookie, he wants the cookie, and that is the beginning and end of his internal monologue.

There is no frontal temporal lobe to process the fact that the cookie, at present, is surrounded by hungry hyenas and covered in fire ants and cyanide.

There is no ability to understand danger, timing, optics, responsibility— only the sound of his own hand slapping the high chair tray, demanding sugar.

He couldn’t wait. Of course he couldn’t. Waiting requires maturity, patience, and judgment — three things this girdle-strangled gravy boat has never possessed, purchased, or successfully faked. So when Qatar handed him a lacquered aerial palace, he demanded the military rush it into service on his schedule. His four-hundred-million-dollar winged tribute. His jet-propelled conflict of interest. His chandelier-grade ego booster with landing gear.

Veruca Salt had to have it now, Daddy.

That’s the whole Palpatine presidency in one sentence.

So workers did the impossible: they compressed years of survivability work into roughly ten months.

And when even that wasn’t fast enough?

They didn’t delay the launch.

They didn’t say “Sir, this will get you killed.”

No. They just… removed things.

They omitted the defensive systems.

Not postponed.

Not backordered.

Omitted.

They skipped the missile defenses on the president’s airplane like it was the extended warranty at a used Kia dealership.

“Nah, she mostly does highway miles.”

And then—because the universe likes a punchline delivered with a brick—they flew it to Turkey.

Turkey shares a border with Iran.

Iran — which the United States had just bombed.

Iran — which has missiles, a grudge, and — according to the President himself, constantly, at podiums, unprompted, with the moist of swollen pride of a man reading five‑star Yelp reviews of his own funeral — his name at the top of its kill list.

And these geniuses put him on the undefended plane.

To go there.

As if nobody would be looking for him in the sky.

As if the single most publicized aircraft on planet Earth — gold‑crusted, photographed from every angle, its itinerary announced to the entire world — was going to slip into Ankara unnoticed.

The whole point of the trip was “look at me.”

The whole problem with that was that people were going to actually fucking look — people with missiles, people with bad intentions, people who needed only the faintest glint of that flying gold billboard to decide that today might be their big historic moment.

Every person responsible for keeping the President alive knew exactly what that plane could and couldn’t do. They didn’t discover its capabilities halfway across the Mediterranean. Nobody popped a maintenance hatch over the Turkish tarmac and screamed, “HOLY SHIT, SOMEBODY FORGOT THE ANTIMISSILE SYSTEM.” They knew what was installed. They knew what was omitted. They knew what the real Air Force One could do that this bedazzled backhander could not.

They knew before takeoff.

Which means somewhere in the Pentagon, a room full of decorated adults — stars on their shoulders, pensions where their spines used to be — looked at a risk assessment that said “this aircraft cannot defend itself,” looked at the deck‑stained diaper mishap stamping his little feet beside his foreign trophy, looked at their mortgages, and said:

“Fuck it. Wheels up.”

A master class in fecklessness.

An entire chain of command boarding an aircraft they knew couldn’t evade a missile, to *fly it toward the missiles*, because telling an eighty‑year‑old no was scarier than the missiles.

Not one of them could form the sentence: “Sorry, sir. I know you love your shiny flying emoluments violation, but we might get shot out of the sky by the country you keep fucking bombing.”

A toddler could manage saying that. My dog could bark it. Honestly, the crusty latex glove left in between the cushions of JD Vance’s college couch could probably gesture the gist.

Then Iran and the U.S. start trading fire again mid‑summit, and suddenly — very quietly — the Secret Service shuffles him back onto the old plane for the trip home. The press pool gets told to keep their window blinds down, which is not a thing that happens on flights where everyone expects to land in one piece. And when a reporter asks him about the Iranian threat, the President of the United States looks at the people he personally hauled into the blast radius and says:

“If I go, you go. Perhaps someday you want to change professions.”

He said that. Aloud. Through whatever’s left of the dentures. To an actual reporter whose only crime was proximity. That’s not presidential reassurance — that’s a kidnapper doing crowd work.

And the cover story? The new plane peeled off to England so the troops could “tour it.” Tour it. As if Mildenhall is some military Sandals resort where the welcome drink is a surface‑to‑air missile.

But I guess he can’t blame “vandals”. for stealing the missile defenses off his sky‑yacht. So he went after the reporters.

On Friday, federal agents showed up at the homes of four New York Times journalists — Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, Eric Schmitt — with grand jury subpoenas so vague they might as well have said, “you know what you did.” This, after a senior FBI official had already called the Times to suggest they kill the story and, while they were in the neighborhood, hand over their sources. Same crew that subpoenaed the Journal and the Post earlier this year. Same crew that raided a Post reporter’s home in January and walked out with her phones, her laptops, and her smartwatch — because nothing says “reporters are not the target” like confiscating a journalist’s Fitbit.

And as funny as literally every other second of this circus is, this part isn’t. Sending armed agents to reporters’ homes for publishing the truth is what they do in Third World dictatorships. It’s what they do in China. In North Korea. In fucking Turkey — the country he just flew his payoff to. He went to Turkey and brought back Turkey’s press policy like it was duty‑free.

That is not what we do in the United States of America. But it is exactly what this regime wants: a press too scared to describe what everyone can see. And the only thing standing between them and that America is their own spectacular, operatic incompetence.

They’re trying. They’re just bad at it.

For now.

Because the Reflecting Pool was never about the pool, and Air Fraud One was never about the plane. It’s the same tantrum with a bigger toy — a creature so cosmically incapable of admitting he fucked up that he’d sooner criminalize journalism than risk reading a headline. He strapped two hundred human beings to his ego, flew them into a missile’s zip code, joked about their deaths to their faces, lied about it, got caught, and then sicced the FBI on the truth like it was behind on its payments.

And sure — it’s easy to joke about the buffoonery. It’s easy to marvel at the spectacular, slapstick stupidity of a man who treats a flimsy, freshly‑pressed, single‑use prop like it’s presidential armor. It’s easy not to give a single solitary shred of a shit when the guy making all the noise is the one who deliberately delivered himself into danger that demanded far more than a maxi pad and a miracle.

But the part that isn’t funny is the part we’re all stuck inside: the perpetual, punishing tantrum of a hangry, hazardous, high‑volume, human‑hand‑grenade of a toddler with a spotlight strapped to his soul. A creature so constitutionally incapable of correction that he detonates the second the world refuses to bend, bow, or break for him.

And when he doesn’t get what he wants the way he wants it, he goes to war with anyone who deals in reality. He targets truth‑tellers, bullies the press, bloodies the facts, and bludgeons the basic scaffolding of science.

That’s the dictator’s dictionary. That’s the tyrant’s toolkit. You smash the press, you sabotage science, you twist truth into a weapon and swing it until the public is stunned, silenced, and stumbling in the dark. Democracy dies in darkness because darkness is deliberate.

This story is embarrassing for the country. It should also be a blaring, blistering, brain‑rattling wake‑up call. Because an attack on the press is an attack on the truth, and an attack on the truth is an attack on every single one of us who still expects to live in a place where facts are allowed to function.

And as for the plane? Fine. Let him take it on whatever grand, self‑glorifying, empty‑cabin farewell tour he thinks he deserves — just so long as he’s the only name on the manifest. And when he finally brings that lonely aircraft in for its inevitable descent into the personal hell of his own making, someone should get on the intercom and gently remind him:

Please place your seat in the upright position, fold up and stow your tray table, and secure all carry‑on items.

It’s going to be a very, very… bumpy landing. 😈

And with that, today’s song:

I love you guys!

Stay safe, stay strong, and stay connected to each other!

💙 Jo

Also — I use Ground News every single day because I stopped trusting headlines a long time ago. The same story can look completely different depending on who’s telling it, who’s paying the bills, and what narrative they’re trying to sell. Ground News lets me compare coverage side by side, spot bias, and catch the stories one side would rather you never see.

I use it for my own research because I want the whole picture, not the billionaire-approved, algorithm-fed version of it. And as a woman, I genuinely appreciate that Ground News was co-founded by women in an industry still dominated by many of the same powerful voices.

If you’re tired of being told what to think and would rather see the receipts for yourself, you can get 40% off the Vantage plan I use right here: 👇

https://groundnews.com/jojo