A White House official says "no final decision" has been made on the fate of the $400 million Boeing 747-8 that Qatar gave President Trump, contradicting more than a year of pledges that the jet would go to his library.
For months, Trump told reporters the luxury plane would follow the same path as Ronald Reagan's retired Air Force One: straight to a presidential library once he left office. In May 2025, when ABC News asked him directly, he said he would not keep using it personally. Now, with roughly two years left in his second term, the White House is walking that commitment back to something far less definite.
The unnamed official told ABC News on Wednesday that "no final decision has been made yet" about the jet's future after Trump leaves the presidency. That careful phrasing arrived the same day NBC News published a report quoting Eric Trump, who is helping develop the presidential library in Miami, saying the library plan is off.
In a text message to NBC News, Eric Trump was blunt.
"No. That's not the plan at the moment for Miami."
He suggested an older, decommissioned Air Force One jet would go to the library instead. The specific aircraft he had in mind was not identified.
That directly clashes with what the president himself said in May 2025, when ABC News' Rachel Scott pressed him on the plane's future. Trump compared it to the Boeing 707 that sits at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, which was retired there in 2001.
"Someday, it will be like Ronald Reagan, they decommission them. You know, they get to a certain age, they decommission them. It'll go to my library. They're talking about going to my library in years out."
Asked point-blank whether he would keep using it, Trump answered: "I wouldn't be using it, no."
So within fifteen months, the plan went from "it'll go to my library" to "that's not the plan at the moment", with the White House splitting the difference by saying nothing is final. The gap between those positions has not been explained.
The jet itself, a Boeing 747-8 donated by the Qatari royal family, remains an unprecedented foreign gift to a sitting president. Valued at roughly $400 million, it drew scrutiny from lawmakers and ethics experts when it arrived, though the specific objections and the names of those critics were not detailed in the reporting.
The U.S. Air Force took the plane to Texas beginning in September to retrofit it for presidential service. The military originally estimated the modifications would cost less than $400 million. How much has actually been spent remains unclear. Many details of the security and communications upgrades are classified.
The jet made its first presidential flight in July, when Trump flew it to a NATO summit in Turkey. But the plane's security limitations surfaced almost immediately. The Secret Service urged Trump to take the older Air Force One for his departure from Turkey, citing differences in security capabilities between the two aircraft. Trump flew the Qatar-donated jet anyway.
After the summit, Trump said the plane would be further "maxed out" with security features, an upgrade expected to take it out of commission for about a month. Whether that work has been completed is not clear from available reporting.
ABC News had previously reported, citing sources familiar with the proposed arrangement, that ownership of the jet would be transferred to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation shortly before Trump leaves office. That arrangement would have kept the plane out of government hands permanently and placed it under the control of Trump's library operation in Miami.
The New York Times also published a report on August 5 raising questions about the jet's future, adding to the pressure that apparently prompted the White House's hedged response.
Trump traveled on August 4 to Los Angeles for a fundraising event and then to Las Vegas for a rally, routine presidential travel that put the plane back in the spotlight just as the competing reports landed.
The core question remains unanswered: if a foreign government donates a $400 million aircraft that American taxpayers then spend hundreds of millions more to retrofit with classified military-grade systems, who should own it when the president who accepted it walks out the door? The White House's answer, for now, is that no one has decided.
When a gift this large stays in limbo this long, the silence tells you more than any official statement would.
