What did Donald Trump do today?

He defended taking the largest single bribe of his presidency so far.

ABC News is reporting today that Trump will accept the gift of a luxuriously appointed jet from the government of Qatar for use as his official plane while in office, and then as a "donation" to his presidential library, which Trump will controls. Trump will therefore have exclusive use of the jet referred to as a "flying palace" for the rest of his life.

ABC is reporting that the Justice Department has been preparing the way with legal arguments claiming that he can accept what is transparently a bribe by the Qatari monarchy. Bribery, especially by foreign countries, is explicitly prohibited by the Constitution in two separate places, and is one of the few specific offenses mentioned as grounds for an impeachment.

The Trump White House dodged comment for most of the day, but late in the evening Trump took to his private microblogging site to try to defend it:

So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Dems are World Class Losers!!! MAGA

Another word for "GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE" is "present." Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution says that no officer of the United States "shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State." Neither bribery nor the receipt of an unconstitutional "present" from a foreign king is less illegal for being done in the open.

Trump's claim that it's only Democrats who are upset about this isn't true either: some of the most pointed criticism has come from his closest ultra-right-wing allies.

Since taking office, Trump has made no real attempt to hide how he personally profits from the presidency. This has ranged from overcharging the Secret Service for the rooms and office space it rents from him so that it can protect him, to acting as his own landlord when his business leased space owned by the federal government, to his pump-and-dump schemes for the Trump-branded memecoin he uses to sell access to himself.

He's also no stranger to using non-profit organizations to pay for his own personal expenses. One of the details revealed by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting by David Farenthold in 2016 was that Trump had used his "charity," the Trump Foundation, to pay for his own bills as minor as a $7 fee for his son's membership in the Boy Scouts. The Trump Foundation was later dissolved by a New York state court for its illegal use of the funds that, for the most part, other people had donated.

One of the crimes committed by Trump's fraudulent charity was an illegal political donation to Pam Bondi, who later became Trump's personal defense attorney and is now his Attorney General. That illegal donation appears to have been a successful bribe, as Bondi—who was then Florida's Attorney General, inexplicably opted Florida out of a multistate lawsuit against Trump's fake school, Trump University. 

Bondi, who reportedly authored the memo giving Trump legal cover to accept the Qatari plane, has also worked as a lobbyist for Qatar.

Why does this matter?

• Whoring out the presidency is still bad even if you've gotten away with it before.
  

• Flaunting how corrupt you are to show how you're above the law is what tinpot dictators do.