There are basically five key Republican talking points when it comes to Donald Trump’s plan to accept a superluxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar. One of the principal defenses, for example, is that the plane would be free, which is both irrelevant and untrue.
Similarly, the president and his allies have argued that the Qatari plane would be a “gift” to the United States, not Trump. That’s also untrue, and the president himself has debunked his own rhetoric. The public has also heard that there’s nothing wrong with foreign gifts, which isn’t true — the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause still exists — and is very much at odds with the president’s earlier positions.
Trump added to the list this week when he suggested the existing Air Force One just isn’t “impressive” enough, which was too silly to even bother discrediting.
But the final talking point might, at first blush, seem more compelling: Trump is being transparent. If he were actually engaged in wrongdoing, the argument goes, he wouldn’t be taking such steps in public, for all the world to see.
Take House Speaker Mike Johnson’s rhetoric, for example.
Speaker Mike Johnson: "The reason many people refer to the Bidens as the 'Biden crime family' is because they were doing all this stuff behind curtains…Whatever President Trump is doing is out in the open. They're not trying to conceal anything…Trump has had nothing to hide."
— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2025-05-14T16:39:25.659Z
“I’ll say that the reason many people refer to the Bidens as the ‘Biden crime family’ is because they were doing all this stuff behind curtains, but in the back rooms; they were trying to conceal it, and they repeatedly lied about it, and they set up shell companies, and the family was all engaged in getting all on the dole,” the Louisiana Republican said at a Capitol Hill press conference. “Whatever President Trump is doing is out in the open. They’re not trying to conceal anything.”
This is not a good argument.
Right off the bat, let’s note for the record that congressional Republicans spent four years desperately trying to find evidence of wrongdoing against Joe Biden, and as the Delaware Democrat left the White House, his GOP detractors had uncovered nothing.
But as important as the former president’s innocence is, it’s equally notable that the House speaker’s core argument is utterly bizarre. By Johnson’s reasoning, if a car thief breaks into a lot, hotwires a car, and then smiles for the security cameras on his way out, there isn’t really a problem. Look at how impressive his transparency was! Making matters just a bit worse, the speaker’s underlying point isn’t altogether true: While some of Trump’s alleged corruption has unfolded in public, there’s still the president’s outrageous memecoin gambit, and the fact that the people buying the dubious “product” are hidden from view. Reminded of this inconvenient detail, Johnson told reporters, “I don’t know anything about the memecoin thing.” That might be true, but it didn’t make the Republican congressman’s case any stronger.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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