A Revealing Joke in the Oval Office About Getting in Trump’s Good Graces

 

A Revealing Joke in the Oval Office About Getting in Trump’s Good Graces

 

The president of South Africa’s wisecrack about a free plane spoke volumes.

 

Shawn McCreesh

By Shawn McCreesh

Shawn McCreesh covers the White House.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us/politics/trump-plane-south-africa-gifts.html

May 22, 2025

 

It has been said that the best jokes are dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

 

On Wednesday, a dangerous joke was told in the Oval Office. The South African president turned to the American president and said: “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.”

 

There was a lot packed into this one little aperçu. Nothing has so succinctly summed up the way the rest of the world feels it must now approach America as these 10 words.

 

I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.

 

The context was lost on no one. Earlier that day, the U.S. government had, under President Trump’s directive, finally and officially accepted the free jumbo jet from Qatar that had become the object of so much controversy and intrigue. Now it had also become a punchline.

 

Mr. Trump, for his part, took it mostly in stride. “I wish you did” have a plane to offer up, he said with a touch of insouciance. “I’d take it. If your country offered the U.S. Air Force a plane, I would take it.”

 

Yes, the man who sits in the gold-colored office likes his golden gifts. It is not as though South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, failed to understand this. He didn’t show up with a 747 jetliner, but he did bring a 30-pound book with pictures of South African golf courses. (“I brought you a really fantastic golf book.”) He also brought along a billionaire South African businessman and a few golfers as guests, to appeal to Mr. Trump’s sensibilities.

 

No plane? No matter. There are many ways to cultivate favor with this billionaire president.

 

One could always purchase a membership to one of Mr. Trump’s private clubs. The cost to join has never been higher. The initiation fee for Mar-a-Lago is $1 million, double what it was when Mr. Trump was last in office, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. Republican officials now hold more events at Mr. Trump’s clubs than ever before.

 

And thousands of people have bought up Mr. Trump’s cryptocurrency token. If someone looking for access to the president had purchased enough to become one of the top 25 holders of Mr. Trump’s memecoin, he or she could have even been invited to Thursday night’s V.I.P. reception for top Trump memecoin holders. It’s being held at another one of the president’s private clubs. (Another option would be to invest in some of the first lady’s cryptocurrency token.)

 

There are other ways to ensure V.I.P. treatment in our nation’s capital these days. One could donate to America250, the committee that’s helping plan the celebrations around the country’s 250th anniversary. Mr. Trump has a military parade in Washington planned. (It happens to fall on the same day as his birthday, June 14.) And the newly Trumpified Kennedy Center is always prospecting for new donors.

 

Visiting dignitaries no longer have the option of playing or staying at one of the president’s hotels when in Washington, since Mr. Trump offloaded the one he was operating out of the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue. But there is the new social club in Georgetown that his son, Donald Trump Jr., is opening. It costs half a million to join up.

 

Many nations seem eager to do business with the president’s sons. The Qataris, the Saudis and the Serbs have all gone into big business with them, to name just a few.

 

Mr. Ramaphosa’s joke about the airplane broke the tension in the room after Mr. Trump a moment earlier erupted at an NBC reporter for daring to ask about the Qatari jet. The president’s defense was to say that the plane was not a gift for him but for the United States.

 

But many of the gifts he is presented with these days have nothing to do with the country.

 

The White House’s defense of the president’s memecoin sweepstakes private access dinner at his club on Thursday is to say that he is doing it on his “personal time.” Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, was pressed about this on Thursday.

 

“It’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency,” she said.

 

Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.